


Pieces: A Story Cycle

by Realmer06



Series: Pieces Universe [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, Harry Potter Next Gen, M/M, Multi, pieces universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2017-11-28 12:06:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 43,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Realmer06/pseuds/Realmer06
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, they're all just parts of a whole. A character by character exploration of 17 members of the next generation.</p><p>Includes: Teddy, Victoire, Dominique, James, Molly, Fred, Scorpius, Rose, Al, Lily, Hugo, Lucy, Roxie<br/>Newest Chapter: Lysander</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Teddy Lupin

**Author's Note:**

> This is a project I've wanted to do for a long time, and it's one I'm finally able to start on. This story cycle will be 17 parts long, one for each of the canon next gen characters (plus one OC I threw in there). This will be my personal canon on these characters, and there will be two ways to read the pieces. One, just the story part which might be a scene, a character study, a stream of consciousness, or what have you. But at the end of each piece, I'll include my thoughts, my process, and why I made the choices I did for each character.
> 
> This is an experiment. We're going to see how it goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: After JKR released her announcement of Teddy's house, I had to change his Sorting here. His personality remains entirely the same, but his house is different.

 

 

  
_Teddy_  
  

The Potter boys didn’t realize how lucky they had it. Their house was so _full_ – of noise, of light, of movement, of love. And they took it all for granted. But Teddy didn’t. He _couldn’t_. Not when his own home, that he shared with Granna, was so completely different: still and silent and dimmer somehow, though the sun shone in just the same. And there was still love at Granna’s, but it didn’t _overflow_ like at Harry’s. It was quieter, calmer, not as obvious. But still there.  
    

He loved his Granna; of course he did. And he knew she loved him, too – he was all she had left in the world; she's told him that before. But he knew, too, that she was an awful lot of broken, and sometimes, he felt that the only thing keeping her pieces held together was the ten-year-old boy she’d been given to care for, back when he was a baby, back when he hadn’t had anyone either, back when his godfather was all the god part and none of the father part because he was only seventeen and didn’t know how to be.  
    

Sometimes, Teddy thought his Granna was grateful he was around, to be the reason her pieces stayed together. And other times, he was convinced she hated him for it, that she wished she could just fall apart and be done with it all, angry that he was the only thing standing in the way.  
    

Those were the times he hated his mum and dad the most.  
    

Teddy Lupin’s hatred for his parents was like a hot, hard ball that always lived in the pit of his stomach, sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller, but never not there. He hadn’t always hated them; when he was little and didn’t know any better, he’d even loved them, thought of them as heroes, believed every good thing anyone had ever told him about Nymphadora Tonks and Remus Lupin. But then he’d learned that his parents had _chosen_ their deaths, their deaths over his life, because his mother had only had him five days before and shouldn’t have been anywhere but in bed, but she went off to fight instead of choosing to be a mother. They hadn’t been ordered to the battle, they hadn’t been needed, they hadn’t made a difference. They’d just died. They’d died and broken Granna into all those little pieces, and they’d left him behind to be an orphan for the rest of his life.  
    

Teddy hated hearing them called heroes, and he hated hearing them called parents, too, because they weren’t. They’d given up being the second to try and be the first, but they’d gotten killed before they could do one single, heroic thing, and Teddy hated them for it. That woman named Tonks had thought so little of him that she had died rather than be his mother, so why shouldn’t he think just as little of her? Why on earth should he call her his mother, when it was so clear she hadn’t wanted to be?  
    

He didn’t tell anybody about these feelings, though. He knew it would make the pieces inside Granna crack apart a little bit more, and it would make Harry wear his sad, hurt look, and Teddy loved them both too much to tell them how much he hated Nymphadora Tonks and Remus Lupin. So every time someone called them ‘hero’ or talked about how proud he should be of his mum and dad, Teddy just took the anger and pushed it down and added it to the ball that was always sitting in his stomach.  
    

The older he got, the more he came to realize that most boys his age didn’t carry about balls like that. Most boys his age weren’t that angry all the time. But then, most boys his age had a real family and a mother and father they could love, not the strange, cobbled together version of a family that Teddy had.  
    

He lived mostly with Granna, but the third week of every month and every other weekend, he spent at Harry’s. He had his own bedroom, which he was allowed to decorate however he wanted, and he had his own towel and his own place at the table, and it was so close to being like his home, but it wasn’t. He knew it wasn't. No matter how hard he and Harry and Ginny tried, they weren’t his parents and they never would be. They had their own sons who were there all the time, not just eleven days out of every month, and no matter how hard he wanted it, Teddy just didn’t fit all the way into that house and that life. There was _too_ much noise and _too_ much movement, and it was like a whirlwind, and though he couldn’t help but get caught up in it and carried off by it, he could never truly become part of it. He just didn’t know how, and he just didn’t fit.  
    

And it was the same at Granna’s, only opposite, because if he moved too fast or spoke too loud there, he knew he was bound to break something. So he tiptoed around and lowered his voice and wished he was at Harry’s. And then he'd get to Harry’s and get pushed and pulled in one direction or another and wish he was at Granna’s. And he knew it was his missing parents who made it so he couldn’t fit anywhere, and he hated Nymphadora and Remus a little bit more.  
    

He wanted so desperately for Hogwarts to be where he could carve a Teddy Lupin shaped hole to put himself into, his place where he could fit perfectly, but the closer he got to going, the more sure he became that his parents were going to be hanging over his head his whole life.  
    

Everyone was full of advice – to be himself, to make friends, to not be nervous about his house or his classes – and Teddy got to the point where he thought if he heard one more person tell him about his clumsy but fun-loving and loyal Hufflepuff mother or his courageous and quietly wise Gryffindor father, he was going to scream.  
    

The morning he was supposed to leave for Hogwarts, his Granna had an appointment she couldn't get out of, so his choice was getting to the station an hour early or letting Harry take him. And he thought about it for a long time, he really did, but something inside of him couldn’t stand the noise and commotion and flurry of craziness that would have happened if Harry had taken him, with little James and Al and baby Lily in tow. He knew he'd never be anything but the boy Harry Potter put on the train if he let his godfather take him, so he chose to get there an hour early.  
    

“Are you sure?” Granna asked the day before, and Teddy nodded. He didn’t tell her it was because he wanted the anonymity, because he didn’t want everyone staring at him. He let her think it was because he wanted her to be the one he said his last goodbye to, because that was part of it, too. It just wasn't all of it.  
    

So he got to the station an hour early and he said his goodbyes to Granna and he picked one of a million empty compartments (since he was the only one there) and opened up a book. He liked books and he liked reading, but he was too busy thinking of all the ways he could reinvent himself at Hogwarts, where no one knew him and he could be whoever he wanted to focus much on this one.  
    

He’d been on the train for a half an hour when the other students started to arrive, and when a boy his age poked his head into the compartment and introduced himself as “Jack Fawcett,” Teddy was very deliberate about introducing himself as “ _Ted_ Lupin,” his mind already spinning a friendship and images and ideas about who this new Ted Lupin was going to be.  
    

All of which was shot to pieces when recognition lit up in Jack Fawcett’s face at Teddy’s last name. “Lupin?” he said curiously. “Like, Professor Lupin? My aunt talks about your dad – says he was the best teacher she ever had at Hogwarts! And, say, isn’t Harry Potter your godfather? Did he bring you today? I’ve seen his picture in the _Prophet_ , and my parents tell stories – but I’ll bet you know them all, right?”  
    

And long before the end of this speech, Teddy’s look was black and the anger was back fiercer than ever, and with a short and rude, “I’m saving this compartment for someone,” he practically shut the door on Jack Fawcett’s toes.  
    

He though it was his black look that kept anyone else from sitting with him, and it partially was, but it was also that Jack Fawcett went around telling people that Ted Lupin in the third compartment from the end was not very friendly and kind of mean, and so Teddy spent the whole ride to Hogwarts in solitude, his anger burning and bubbling and very close to boiling over.  
    

And it did boil over when his name was called to be Sorted.  
    

Because all of a sudden, there was whispering, and he didn't know what they were saying, but was enough that they were whispering because they were whispering about him. These people who didn’t know him. Who didn’t know his life and his situation and who he was or who he could be. It was enough that they were probably whispering about Granna and Harry and Remus and Nymphadora, and he couldn’t stand it, he really couldn’t.  
    

When the Sorting Hat was placed on his head, Teddy Lupin was so full of anger and rage that he cut off the Hat before it could say anything, as Harry and Ginny both told him it would.  
    

 _I don’t want to hear a_ word _about my mother or my father or my godfather or_ anyone, he thought furiously. _Sort me and me alone, you stupid Hat, because that’s all that should matter, got it?_  
    

And without a single word spoken inside Teddy Lupin’s head, the Hat shouted “HUFFLEPUFF!” and Teddy barely let it finish the word before yanking it off his head and stalking down to the Hufflepuff table. He could hear muttering, no doubt in reaction to his dark look and angry movements, so out of keeping with the expected traits of a Hufflepuff, but Teddy didn't care. The people at Hogwarts could think what they wanted. Teddy wasn’t there to please anyone. Teddy wasn’t there to make friends. He was there because he had to be.  
    

And as he slid into his seat, glaring defiantly at anyone who dared to meet his gaze, he thought that maybe, if everyone was so shocked by him, so surprised by him, then maybe for once, everyone would just leave him alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: After JKR released her announcement of Teddy's house, I had to change his Sorting here. His personality remains entirely the same, but his house is different.
> 
> If you've read my HP stories on ff.net, you'll know I've written extensively about Teddy Lupin before. This is not that Teddy Lupin. This Teddy Lupin is angry, and closed-off. But this Teddy grew out of that other Teddy. Basically, I wanted to explore a side of Teddy Lupin the fandom seems to ignore. I wanted to see what would happen if Teddy never grew out of his anger toward his parents, and I became very intrigued by the idea of placing him in Slytherin. Sadly, JKR disagreed, but I can see this personality working in Hufflepuff as well. Regardless of Sorting, this is a Teddy Lupin who is angry and sullen and wanting nothing more than to be ignored by the world. A Teddy Lupin who hates his parents and refuses to see them as heroes, who doesn't fit in anywhere. There are stories in the works with this Teddy, fitting him into the epilogue canon, helping him deal with his anger and angst, and putting him up against the Pieces Victoire, who we'll be exploring next.


	2. Victoire Weasley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Victoire Weasley

_Victoire_

Victoire Antoinetta Weasley was perfect.

It wasn't her fault. She'd never really had a choice.

When she was nine years old, a photograph of her had appeared in _The Daily Prophet_ – an innocent child in a frilly white dress, long blonde hair spilling down her back, staring up at the war memorial in the Ministry of Magic, her reflection broken apart by the names of the dead engraved into the stone. Overnight, she'd become an emblem for the Wizarding world, a responsibility that had demanded perfection, and so, perfect she had become.

There was never any pressure for perfection from her parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles. They loved her no matter what. Victoire knew that. But after that ninth birthday and that famous, iconic photograph, the pressure poured in from other sources. She was an icon. A paragon. The quintessential picture of innocence, the physical embodiment of all that had been fought for years before she was born.

"Victory's Child" was the title of that photograph.

There were days when Victoire hated that photograph.

It wasn't as if she'd consciously set out to be some picture of innocence that day. It had been her ninth birthday, she'd thrown a temper tantrum because she'd picked up on the fact that her birthday was being overshadowed by something, and when her dad had explained the war to her, she'd asked to go to the ceremony. She'd just wanted to see her uncle's name on the wall. She hadn't asked for the moment to be captured on film. She hadn't asked to be mentioned by name in her uncle Harry's speech. She hadn't asked to be singled out through her birthday and her name and her presence.

She was the oldest Weasley grandchild. Her uncle was Harry Potter. Her name meant victory, and she was born one year to the day of the end of the biggest war most of the wizarding world could remember. And all this had been highlighted by one photograph that had taken the world by storm, and now, the eyes of the world rested on her once a year, whether she wanted them to or not. Perfection was expected. Perfection had to be delivered. Perfection was, therefore, the only option available.

Perfection wasn't easy. Victoire struggled with it daily, especially when she got to Hogwarts. Because it wasn't just about being a good student and a model Gryffindor, being top of the class, on track to become Prefect and Head Girl. It was also about being friendly and likeable and social and personable.

It was lucky that Victoire was naturally outgoing, that she had an easy smile and knew how to talk to people. It was lucky that she could make friends easily, that she was genuine and sweet and likeable before she put the effort in. She was one-eighth Veela, and it wasn't enough to convince men to fall at her feet or allow her to charm crowds of people, but it was enough to help make her sunny and friendly and charismatic, even more so than she already was. She was the kind of girl one couldn't help but like.

She made school seem effortless, and she had time for everyone. By the time she was thirteen years old, the whole school knew her name, and knew that she was always willing to serve as a tutor or help with homework or offer advice or a shoulder to cry on. _Victoire Weasley will help you_ , that's what everyone knew to be true.

They didn't see how much work that truly was. They didn't see how every minute of every day was assigned a purpose, be it class or homework or socializing. They didn't see how she spent the summers between years studying her dad's old textbooks, trying to get a head start on what she would be learning that year, so that she might have some chance of staying on top of it all. She signed up for all the extra classes her third year partly because twelve OWLs were expected and partly because she knew a Time Turner would make things immeasurably easier.

She broke the Time Turner rules just a little bit, not a lot, not so anyone would notice. But she'd wake up perhaps once or twice a week to the warm weight of a second person in her bed. She never saw the second person, because Victoire was always careful about Disillusioning herself before using the Time Turner to get some extra sleep, but the beds weren't large, and Victoire could always tell when she was sleeping next to her hours-older self. Waking up to that extra weight was always her cue to climb out of bed and head to the Common Room and work steadily for the next few hours on her schoolwork. Essays finished, spells mastered, whatever she'd been having difficulties figuring out managed and learned, she'd turn the clock back and recapture the lost hours of sleep.

But that was behind the scenes. That was what nobody saw. That was the side of herself that she kept carefully hidden away – the side that struggled. The side that didn't understand the material the first time around. The side that had to work to overcome failure. Because if there was one thing she couldn't let anyone see, it was her failures. What right did she have to struggle, she who everyone looked to for inspiration? How was it fair for her, the girl everyone counted on, to display her shortcomings for everyone to see? No, she wouldn't let her fellow students, her teachers, her family down. She would be what they needed her to be, whatever she had to do, hard as it might be sometimes. Her fits of temper, her frustrations, the times she wanted to rage at the world? She let those out in the solitude of the late-night Common Room, where no one could see, and by the light of the morning, she put on her best smile to greet the world as the sunny and carefree Victoire Weasley everyone knew and loved.

Perfection was lonely. Victoire hated herself the moment she thought that, and hated even more that it was true. To be lonely in a school where everyone knew her name seemed selfish. To long for someone to whom she could admit and reveal her shortcomings when she was surrounded by people who wanted to call her their friend seemed ungrateful. But the truth that she couldn't deny was that while everyone wanted to know her, no one seemed as interested in _getting_ to know her. And while everyone wanted her to be the one to fix their problems, no one seemed willing to reach out and return the favor.

A month before her fourteenth birthday, Victoire was contacted by _The Daily Prophet_ and the Wizarding Wireless Network. They wanted her to attend the 15th Anniversary ceremony. They wanted her to give an interview. They wanted to recreate the photo that had been taken five years previous. With a flattered and honored smile, she graciously accepted, provided that it was all right with her parents and teachers.

And so, on May 2, 2013, Victoire sat in the Ministry's Hall of Memory, smiled and shook the hand of the _Prophet_ reporter Millie Jenkins, and answered the questions that would put her even more in the spotlight than the photograph had five years before.

"Thank you for agreeing to speak with us, Miss Weasley," Miss Jenkins said. "And, if I may, happy birthday."

"Oh, thank you," Victoire said warmly, slightly surprised by the birthday wishes.

"Because today is your fourteenth birthday, as well as being the fifteenth anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts and the end of the last Great War. How has it been, Victoire, growing up with this fact? Did your birthday get overshadowed at all?"

The interview went much as Victoire had expected – they talked about that birthday and what had been going through her mind, they talked about her family and how lucky she was to have had the childhood she did, they talked about Hogwarts and how much she enjoyed her schooling. And Victoire said all the things that the quintessential image of innocence was supposed to say.

And then Miss Jenkins asked an unexpected question.

It came about in a predictable enough way, talking about the Uncle Fred Victoire had never met, and what seeing his name on the wall had meant to her.

"The wall was overwhelming to me," she said to Miss Jenkins. "And I had to focus my attention down to something small, and that something was his name. That one name on that huge wall, that was someone my family had lost. That was someone that _I_ had lost, even though I never knew him. And I remember thinking that every little girl probably had a name on that wall somewhere. Everyone I could meet had a name on that wall, had been touched and affected by these things that had happened. And while some might see that as overwhelmingly sad, I've come to see it as something uplifting, in many ways. Because it means that I have this connection to everyone I meet. We have all been affected by the events of fifteen years ago, and that is significant. This wall reminds us that we have a responsibility to keep this from happening again, whether we were there last time or not."

And then Miss Jenkins had asked The Question.

"Victoire, you say that we have a responsibility, to keep this from happening again. What do you think we can do, how can we fulfill that responsibility in our everyday lives?"

And suddenly, Victoire saw an opportunity presented to her that she had never thought about taking before. A chance to become more than just some image of innocence. To try and put voice to a thought that had been growing out of the growing frustration and loneliness of the last year of her life. To say something meaningful instead of just what everyone expected to hear.

After all, she thought in a moment of blinding clarity, the whole world was listening to her. Didn't she owe it to them to have something worthwhile to say?

"I have an answer," she said, interrupting Miss Jenkins in the middle of her condescending statement about not being afraid if she didn't have an answer to that big question. "We have to make sure that we stop judging people unfairly for things they have no say in or things that are out of their control. In the last war, it was blood status, thinking that a person could be easily defined by who their parents were and how far back they could trace their bloodline."

"Are you saying that blood status discrimination is still an issue?" Miss Jenkins asked with raised eyebrows.

"I'm saying that since the war ended, we've paid a lot of attention to making sure that it _isn't_ , but there are lots of other ways to discriminate against people that _haven't_ been addressed yet, but are just as silly as thinking less of someone for being a Muggleborn."

"Such as?" Miss Jenkins asked with genuine curiosity.

"Like lycanthropy," Victoire said, knowing that this would be the moment the world sat up and took notice. This was the point of no return, and rather than turn back, Victoire took a deep breath and took a stand and said words she hoped she would be remembered for far longer than a photograph snapped of her when she was nine. That identity had been handed to her. This one, she was choosing.

"In most cases of lycanthropy, the person in question is bitten as a small child, and they have no more control over that than they do over their blood status or hair color, and yet, we treat them with fear and hostility. Lycanthropes can be considered a danger to other people a mere handful of hours out of every month, and that's only if they lack access to Wolfsbane potion or other protective and preventative measures. I know plenty of people who are more consistently dangerous than that, and yet it is the lycanthropes who are treated with suspicion and often lack basic human rights. And the stigma extends to their children as well, despite conclusive evidence that lycanthropy is not hereditary."

"And before you ask," she said as Miss Jenkins opened her mouth to break in, "no. This has nothing to do with my father. But there is something about my father I would like to say. My father was attacked by a man named Fenrir Greybeck. A five year old boy was also attacked by Fenrir Greybeck, a boy far less able to defend himself against such an attack than my father, in his twenties, and a trained curse breaker. And yet, my father was treated with reverence and respect while this five year old boy was ostracized and treated with hostility and contempt. All because Fenrir passed his lycanthropy to one of these victims and not the other. That five year old grew into a good and gentle man who was respected and loved by those who took the time to get to know him. And I know this man's son. He's a student at Hogwarts, and I've grown up with him, and he stands apart at school. He doesn't have many friends, and I think a lot of it has to do with the stigma attached to him because of who his father was, and that isn't fair."

Maybe someday, Teddy Lupin would thank her for this. But even if he never did, if she could use her position to make people think about that boy on the edges a little differently, she'd have succeeded.

"Lycanthropy is one example of a much larger issue," Victoire continued when it became clear that Miss Jenkins was speechless. "Discrimination happens along lines much less distinct and obvious than that one - poverty, ethnicity, history. Differences that are feared rather than celebrated. You asked how we can fulfill our responsibility to keep the Great War from happening again, and that's my answer. Start celebrating differences. Reach out to someone you normally wouldn't and find a connection. There will always be something. It can start as simply as a smile and a kind word, being friendly and open to everyone you meet. That's what I try to do. That's what I would encourage everyone to do."

"So, it's not just about werewolves?" Miss Jenkins asked, with what was surely supposed to be a conspiratorial smile that Victoire was meant to share. She didn't.

"Lycanthropy is a big picture issue," she said, perfectly serious. "And I'm only fourteen. Someday, I hope it can be one of the issues I help to tackle. But in the meantime, I'm going to do what I can in the halls of my school, for and hopefully with all the students who share it with me."

"Well," Miss Jenkins said after only the slightest of pauses. "Victoire Weasley. Budding activist. With an unusual but compelling call to arms. Thank you, Miss Weasley, for your insightful words and call to action. And with that, we say farewell to Victory's Child."

 _Farewell to Victory's Child, indeed,_ Victoire thought, because she knew it to be true. She would no longer be remembered for a photograph.

No, she thought with a solid surety. She would be remembered for something far more important, and something of her own creation. And maybe some people would start thinking about what she'd said, truly considering the words from the mouth of their perfect golden girl. If the world was determined to see her that way, she might as well use the power to accomplish something meaningful.

On her ninth birthday, Victoire Weasley became an icon. On her fourteenth, she became a personality. And the eyes of the world rested heavily upon her as they waited to see what she would become next.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my Victoire from The Way It's Supposed to Be. I wrote that for a birthday challenge fest, and I chose Victoire because someone who shares a birthday with the anniversary of the end of the war was just fascinating to me.
> 
> And one visual really stuck with me from that story - the image of a little girl standing in front of a wall of names, her reflection broken up by the lettering. And I thought, what if someone had snapped a photograph of that? And what if that photo had become a famous, iconic image? How would that have informed how Victoire grew up?
> 
> Enter Perfect Victoire. A child in the spotlight in a vastly different way than Harry's kids, under a vastly different kind of pressure. A child who has to be perfect because the eyes of the world are upon her.
> 
> But more than that, I wanted to create a Victoire who stood at the completely opposite end of the spectrum from this universe's Teddy. I'm really looking forward to throwing these two together and crafting a relationship out of two such different personalities.


	3. Dominique Weasley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not easy, having an older sister who is perfect.

_Dominique_

For as long as she could remember, everything about Dominique Weasley had been defined by her older sister. Whenever anyone noticed her or referred to her or described her, it was always in comparison to Victoire. She was slightly taller than Victoire. Her hair was a little bit redder than Victoire's. She looked so much like Victoire.

Even the nickname almost everyone in the world called her – Nika – was a gift from Victoire, a two-year-old's inability to pronounce Dominique. 'Nika' had become Victoire's name for her, and everyone had thought it so cute that it had stuck, even with her grandmothers, despite it being a universally acknowledged fact that grandmothers will always call you by your full name, whether you want them to or not.

And it wasn't that Dominique resented any of this, not really. It was just a truth of her life. She was second to Victoire – second in age, second in grandchild line-up, second in radiance and ability and everything else. Because Victoire was perfect, and that meant it was literally impossible for Dominique to be anything other than second-best.

Sometimes, Dominique would stand in front of her mirror and try to figure out what gene from her parents had been handed to Victoire but had totally missed her.

Victoire had their mother's long, straight white-blonde hair that betrayed absolutely nothing about her Weasley side. The only hint toward generations of redheads was a slight sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks perfectly placed to be adorable, the one tiny flaw to make her human.

Dominique, on the other hand, had hair that was not full Weasley red, but it was far more red than Victoire's, resulting in a color that really had no name, and while it was mostly straight, it had a tendency to frizz and curl in the rain, just around her ears and neck. Pulling it back in any way only made the frizzy curls more pronounced. And her skin was _covered_ in freckles, just about every inch of it, and the only positive note about that fact was that they covered the pimples that no treatment, magical or otherwise, seemed to touch.

And they'd both inherited their father's height, but Victoire wore hers gracefully, and it wasn't excessive. Whereas Dominique had started sprouting upward the moment she'd hit puberty, and had now reached a height that no nearly-14-year-old girl should have forced upon her. She was lanky and gangly, and her arms and legs were far too long to be manageable. She felt like a bumbling giant, in danger of destroying something every time she turned around.

She usually ended up turning away from the mirror in frustration before she allowed herself time to take in her stick-straight figure and knobby knees and bizarrely stubby fingers.

The truth was, Dominique felt stuck, stuck in second place, stuck in Victoire's shadow, never able to escape the comparison, never able to measure up. It didn't matter what she did or how well she did it; Victoire had done it first, and Victoire had inevitably done it better. When she got to Hogwarts, it just became more true.

And the worst of it was, she couldn't even be angry with her sister, because it wasn't as if it was Victoire's fault. She didn't ask to be born first and to be perfect. And even if she had, Victoire wasn't the kind of person you could be angry with. Dominique knew; she'd tried. But every time she wanted to get angry with Victoire – because she was prettier, because she was more socially graceful, because she cast the shadow Dominique couldn't escape from – Victoire would do something kind or considerate or thoughtful for her, and all of Dominique's anger would melt away, replaced by frustrated resignation that was directed more at herself than her sister.

There were days when Dominique felt that the only time the whole world stopped watching Victoire was when it turned its expectant attention on her, as if to ask, _And you, Nika? What do you have to show us?_

Her fourteenth birthday was one such day.

It was the middle of July, and the whole family had come to Grandma and Grandpa Weasley's, as they did every summer. As it was her birthday, she'd been given the gift of being allowed sleep in, and so she didn't head down to the kitchen for breakfast until after the post had arrived. Before she reached the landing, however, her mother's voice echoed up the stairs.

"But Victoire, this is wonderful news! Gryffindor Prefect! We must tell everyone at once, they will all be so proud!"

Dominique's heart dropped down into her feet. She'd known the letter was coming, she'd known Victoire would be named Prefect, she'd known it would come while they were all at the Burrow, but _why_ , on _today_ of all days?

"Maman," Dominique heard Victoire interrupt, "I don't want to tell anyone. Not yet. Not today."

"But why?" Dominique's mother asked, confused by her daughter's request.

"It's Nika's birthday." She said it simply, as if that one fact explained everything, and Dominique threw her head back against the wall of the stairs in frustration. "It's not fair to overshadow that," Victoire continued. "I'll still be Prefect tomorrow, but Nika only turns fourteen once. Please, Maman?"

" _Godric_ ," Dominique muttered darkly under her breath, "Stop being perfectly understanding and empathetic, and just steal my thunder for once, would you?"

She found herself suddenly with no appetite for breakfast. Knowing she'd be discovered by someone if she didn't move soon, she slipped through the back door and out over the hill behind the house, kicking at the grass to vent her frustration.

"That does not look like the face of a particularly happy birthday girl."

Dominique looked up as she crested the hill to see her Uncle Charlie leaning on a shovel, watching her.

"Yeah, well," Dominique said darkly, crossing to the fence that separated the garden from the field beyond, "what's a birthday? It's not that important. After all, it's something you see coming from a mile away, just like Victoire getting named Prefect. And this is just the beginning. Next summer, it'll be her twelve Outstanding OWLs. The summer after that, being named Head Girl! And then perfect NEWT results and every Department in the Ministry _begging_ her to accept their internship."

Understanding played out over her uncle's face, and Dominique looked at the ground, a bit embarrassed by the bitterness that had escaped her.

"Okay," Uncle Charlie said, setting down the shovel with a grunt and patting the fence between them. "Sounds like someone needs to unpack a bit. What's up, Dom?"

Her uncle Charlie was the only person in the entire world who called her anything other than 'Nika,' and Dominique adored him for it. Realistically, she knew it was only because he'd been on assignment out of communication range for the 18 months after her birth and so had missed the development of the nickname, but that didn't matter. He called her Dom and nothing in 14 years had convinced him to do otherwise.

And she knew you weren't supposed to have favorite family members, but she couldn't help it. Uncle Charlie was her favorite uncle. Over the years, when everyone else was showering attention and praise on Victoire, Uncle Charlie was always at Dominique's side, giving her a compliment or a wink or a gift or something, and he always made her feel noticed. She'd asked him about it once, and he'd said that Victoire had plenty of people to pay attention to her, but that he understood the plight of the second-born, and he would always be in her camp.

As she took a seat on the fence, she remembered that conversation, and she found herself opening up. "It's my birthday," she said heavily, and Uncle Charlie filled in the blank.

"And Victoire prefect badge came in the post this morning?" When Dominique nodded, he continued, "Well, I don't think you have anything to worry about, Dom. Your sister would never—"

"I know, that's the point!" Dominique interrupted in frustration. "The point isn't that I'm upset she's going to announce it and take focus away from me, the point is that she _isn't_ going to do that! She's going to keep the scores a secret so that she doesn't steal the spotlight away from her little sister's special day, because she's perfect, and that's what perfect people do! They're entirely considerate and selfless and humble and they make the rest of us look bad!"

"Sounds like someone's feeling a little inadequate," he commented, leaning on the fence beside her. Dominique huffed heavily, blowing stray tendrils of hair out of her face.

"How do you not when Victoire Weasley is your older sister?" she mumbled at her hands. "You know, being her sister just makes it worse half the time."

"How so?" Uncle Charlie asked.

"Because . . ." Dominique searched for the words. "Because everyone expects me to have some great insight into her, because I'm her sister. But I don't. She's just as much larger than life to me as she is to everybody else. I don't _know_ her, not really. And I don't understand her."

Uncle Charlie said nothing to this, just continued to lean on the fence, looking pensive.

"Did you ever have to deal with this with Dad?" Dominique asked then, and Uncle Charlie watched her closely out of the corner of his eye.

"What do you mean?"

"People tell me stories, about when he was at school. How he was top of the class, perfect student, Prefect, Head Boy. The teachers all loved him, but the students did, too, and he was basically everyone's favorite. Just like Victoire. So did you have to deal with it, with being second best?"

Uncle Charlie considered his answer carefully. "Well," he finally said, "honestly, no. I never saw your dad and I as being in competition quite the way that you mean. For that, you'd be better off talking to your Uncle Percy."

Dominique gave a snort. "Yeah, Uncle Percy's not exactly the kind of person you talk to about stuff like this. He'd probably launch into an explanation of some theory of magical sibling hierarchy and forget to give me any actual advice."

Uncle Charlie hid a smile at that. "I think he'd be better at the advice than you might think. So would your Uncle Ron, for that matter."

"But I'm not talking to Uncle Percy or Uncle Ron, I'm talking to you," Dominique said impatiently. She just wanted an answer! "I want to know how I can get people to look at me and not see me as just Victoire's little sister. I'm tired of being defined by her. I want to be defined as me!"

"And what does that mean?" Uncle Charlie asked, and his words brought Dominique up short.

"What do you mean?" she asked, puzzled.

"Who is Dominique Weasley?" he clarified. "What are her strengths, her weaknesses, her passions, her interests? What makes her who she is? What's important about her?"

"I . . . don't know," Dominique said in a small voice.

"Then it seems to me that your first step needs to be taking the time to answer some of those questions. Getting to know yourself, as it were. Because if you don't, how is anyone else supposed to?"

Dominique was silent for a long time. Then, she said, "I don't know how to do that."

"Well, I can tell you that it's pretty simple, all things considered. But that doesn't mean it's going to be easy," Uncle Charlie said. "You're going to have to step out of your comfort zone, try new things, new experiences. Discover what you're interested in, what you're good at, what you're lousy at, all of it. You need to figure out who Dominique Weasley really is. In fact, I'm making that your assignment."

"What?" Dominique asked, startled.

"Your assignment," Uncle Charlie repeated. "Your summer project. We'll call it 'Defining Dominique.' For the next three weeks, you need to be working on a list of statements that define you. It needs to be at least five items long, and you need to be ready to present it to me by the last week of this month. That gives you a three weeks."

Dominique stared at him. "Are you serious?" she finally asked.

"Completely," he said, and she knew he meant it.

"So I just put together a list of things that make me different from Victoire?" she asked, and Uncle Charlie frowned at her.

"When, in any of that, did you hear me mention your sister?" he asked. "Even once. When?" Dominique colored.

"You didn't," she said.

"That's right," Uncle Charlie said, and then his tone got gentler. "Dom, the first person you have to convince to stop defining you through Victoire, is you. I don't want her to enter into your head at all while you're making this list. I don't give a damn one way or the other if any or all of your statements could also apply to her. She isn't important to this. This is about you, and only you. Got it?"

Still blushing Weasley red, Dominique nodded.

"Good girl," Uncle Charlie said then. "Come to me in three weeks with your list, and I'll tell you the secret."

"What secret?" Dominique asked, her curiosity piqued in spite of herself. Uncle Charlie's eyes twinkled.

"The secret of how I kept from feeling second best next to your dad," he said simply.

Over the course of the next three weeks, Dominique became a different person. She tried things she'd never done before, like making dinner with Grandma Weasley and playing chess with Uncle Ron. She spent an afternoon in Muggle London with her Aunt Audrey, and spent another tinkering with Muggle gadgets alongside Grandpa Weasley in the shed out back. She fed the chickens and collected eggs and tried her hand at knitting. She asked to shadow her dad at the bank, and then proceeded to ask to shadow every single one of her aunts and uncles to their various jobs. She went to the Ministry with Uncle Percy and the Quidditch pitch with Aunt Ginny and the joke shop with Uncle George. She offered to babysit all ten of her younger cousins for a day so the adults could go out for a night on the town.

In short, she was more engaged and active in those three weeks than she had ever been in her life. At one point, her dad pulled Uncle Charlie aside and asked, "Charlie, you wouldn't happen to be behind the drastic change in my youngest daughter of late, would you?"

Uncle Charlie just smiled. "No," he said. "Adolescence and growing self-awareness are behind it. I may have catalyzed her current project to help her fit into her own skin a little easier, but what you're seeing is all her."

"And this project?" Dominique's father asked. "You want to fill me in on that?"

"Come to the pasture next Monday," was all Uncle Charlie would say. "And Dom might just do that on her own."

When her three weeks were up, Dominique went to the fence where Uncle Charlie had first given her the challenge she'd been working on for the past month and a half. But it wasn't just Uncle Charlie waiting for her – it was her father as well, and the sight of him brought her up short. She stopped suddenly, looking at him with apprehension, fingers inadvertently crumpling the paper in her hand.

"Do you mind if I sit in?" her father asked, and Dominique had to swallow a few times before she answered. She glanced at Uncle Charlie, who smiled encouragingly.

"What better way to start?" he asked softly, and Dominique took a deep breath.

"Promise you won't get mad at me?" she asked, her voice shaking the tiniest bit. Her father frowned.

"Why would you think I would get mad at you, Nika?" he asked, and whether it was her uncle's encouraging presence or the list in her hand or the fact that the last six weeks had changed something about her, Dominique did something she'd never done before – she spoke up.

"Because the first thing on my list is that I hate that name," she said, and the words came out in a rush, surprising both herself and her father. She saw his eyebrows rise, and she took a deep breath and continued. "I think my name, Dominique, is beautiful, and I hate that you gave it to me but don't use it. I know I can't just expect everyone to up and change what they call me after fourteen years, but the fact is, I really would prefer to be Dominique, or Dom. Not Nika."

The rush of courage that had allowed her to say all that spent, she looked at the grass at her feet, terrified at her daring, almost amazed at what had just come out of her mouth. Old Dominique would never have stirred the waters like that. Old Dominique wouldn't have dared.

"Dominique." The sound of her name brought her head up, nervously, but in her father's gaze there was no censure or disappointment as she had feared there might be, but only, dare she say it, pride? "I didn't know you felt that way," he said, an apology in his words. Dominique felt brave enough to smile.

"I didn't either," she admitted.

Her father nodded, once, then said, "Well, then. What else don't I know about you?"

She started off reading from her list, but the longer she spoke to them, admitting that she thought Quidditch was boring and that she loved Muggle literature, she found that she abandoned the list before long and just _spoke_ to them, told her father and her favorite uncle about who she really was, a girl who would like to spend a summer in France, a girl who wanted to learn to cook, who was good with kids, who was hopeless at chess and thought she might like to be a Muggle liaison someday.

And when she had said her fill, Uncle Charlie beamed down at her and swept her up in a one armed hug. "And now the secret?" she reminded him, and her father raised his eyebrows.

"What secret?" he asked, and Dominique felt herself blushing again.

"He promised to tell me how he avoided feeling second-best next to you," she admitted, and Uncle Charlie laughed at the look on her dad's face.

"Now, this is a secret I'd like to hear," her dad said, prompting another laugh from Uncle Charlie.

"All right," he said, ruffling Dominique's hair. "It's simple. Your dad was my best friend. Still is. That's how."

Dominique frowned. "That's it?" she said, and it was her father who answered.

"You'd be surprised how important that is," he said simply. "And now I have a secret for you, Dominique. Being perfect can get awfully lonely when you don't have a best friend. That one person who doesn't expect or need perfection from you, the person you can really be yourself around."

Dominique's frown deepened. "But who's Victoire's?" she asked, and her father shrugged, a little sadly.

"I don't know that she has one," he said, his voice soft, his gaze toward the Burrow, where Victoire was visible through a window.

It was a lot to think about, especially after all the revelations that day had already provided. But as Dominique moved back toward the house with her uncle and father, she had a great deal besides her own new identity to think about. If she really put her mind to it, she wondered, what could she really become?

"Uncle Charlie?" she said before he could enter the house. At her words, her dad smiled and left them standing alone outside the door, her uncle turned back to her. "Thank you," she said.

Uncle Charlie smiled. "I told you, kid," he said. "I'm always going to be in your camp." She gave him a quick hug before darting inside.

She'd think more about Victoire later, spend more time pondering her father's words tomorrow, or the next day, when everything had had time to settle a bit. But for now, she had to pack for Hogwarts, the start of her fourth year, and the chance for her to truly become Dominique Weasley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Dominique. This piece goes out to anyone who has ever felt overshadowed by an older sibling.
> 
> If you're familiar with a piece I wrote last year, The Noticing of Lucy Weasley, you'll recognize some of this character. I put her into Lucy in that universe, but for Pieces, I wanted that child who didn't fit in to be Dominique. Eventually, this Dominique will become Victoire's best friend, but I wanted to look at where that started and where she'd come from, and I hit on the idea pretty early on of making Charlie her favorite uncle and confidant. 
> 
> So here's the awkward adolescent trying to be noticed from within the shadow of her famous sister's brilliance, but it's an effort doomed to failure because Dominique has no idea who she is. Hence 'Defining Dominique.' This grew from there.


	4. James Potter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I own nothing, and Maggie is awesome.

_James_

Saying that James Sirius Potter had a penchant for mischief was like saying that Merlin was a fairly well known wizard. When James was barely able to walk, he somehow pushed over all the bookcases in his father's study. When he was three, he set fire to the broomshed. When he was four, he magicked his little brother to their bedroom ceiling and it took his parents 45 minutes to figure out how to get him down. And that was all before he reached the age where his mischief became deliberate.

"James," he remembered his father saying in a resigned but conversational tone after he had been caught putting slugs in Lily's bed at the age of six, "do you enjoy causing mayhem?"

"I dunno," James had said. "What's 'mayhem' mean?"

"Chaos. Destruction. Trouble. Things that make your little sister shriek."

"Oh," James had said. "Then yes."

His parents had taught him to answer questions honestly, so he hadn't been able to understand why his answer had made his mother laugh and his father bury his face in his hands.

He understood later, of course, but by then, it was widely acknowledged that James was simply going to cause trouble, whether he intended to or not (he usually did). James embraced it; he'd meant what he'd said when he was six – there was something he really did enjoy about hearing the shriek that indicated a prank well-played.

He'd heard more stories over the course of his life than his parents had ever wanted him to about his namesakes and all the trouble they'd gotten up to in their lives, and James had long aspired to achieving that level of notoriety. So it may have been an understatement to say that James Sirius Potter had a penchant for mischief, but that didn't make the statement any less true.

It was through his penchant for mischief that James found out the truth about his dad.

When James was ten, he and his dad went Christmas shopping, just the two of them, and his dad made him go into an old people's shop, full of boring, breakable things, and yeah, Dad _told_ him not to touch anything, but the perfume bottles were lined up so perfectly they looked just like dominoes, and well, what would you have done?

"James!" His dad's voice was sharp and long-suffering, and James froze, his hand still raised in an incriminating posture, a line of knocked over perfume bottles leading directly from his fingers to the broken glass and sweet-smelling puddle on the shop floor. "Did I or did I not tell you not to touch anything?"

James had learned in four years when his parents were asking questions that shouldn't be answered, but even if he'd intended to respond, he wouldn't have had a chance, because the sound of breaking glass summoned the shop owner, who started berating James's father for not watching his son more carefully, for letting him wander and touch breakable objects, for being responsible for what sounded like complete destruction of half the shop — until he saw who James's father actually was.

"Oh, Mr. Potter!" he said in alarm, his tone and manner changing entirely. "I – I'm so sorry, so sorry, I didn't see it was you. Please, accept my apologies."

James frowned. Why should who his dad was have anything to do with it?

But his father spoke over the man, saying, "No, the apologies are mine. And my sons's." James felt a weight on his shoulders, firm and heavy, and he knew he was in trouble. His dad didn't do the double-shoulder-hand-rest lightly. James focuses on his shoes. "James," his dad said sharply, expectant.

"Sorry," James muttered.

"Oh, no, no, no," the shop owner said quickly, all smiles now. "It was my fault – too tempting for a young boy, too precariously placed. An accident, I'm sure."

For a moment, James actually thought he might get away with it, but his father's next words banished that thought.

"Well, I'm less sure," he said, still in that steely voice. "I know my son, so please, tell me the cost of the perfume, and the damages to the rug."

"Truly, Mr. Potter, there is no need for you to pay."

"Oh, I won't be paying," James's dad said, and James felt a new dread growing in the pit of his stomach, sparked into existence by firmer pressure from his father's hands. "I am going to be using this incident as an opportunity to teach my son a lesson in responsibility."

And now the dread was fully pronounced. And in a matter of minutes, the shop owner had named a price that seemed excessive for a little bit of smelly water and an old rug, and his father was steering James forcefully out of the shop.

"Dad, this is totally unfair!" James protested. "Either one of you could have waved your wand and fixed it in a heartbeat!"

"That isn't the point, James," his dad said in a firm voice, stopping on the walk and kneeling down so he was level with his son. "Just because we have the ability to repair items does not give us permission to destroy them in the first place. Not everything that is destroyed can be fixed with the wave of a wand, and what belongs to others deserves our respect, as surely as the people themselves do. _That_ is why you will be paying for the damages you caused."

"But I don't even _have_ four and a half Galleons!"

"I know," his dad said. "Which is why I'll be withholding your pocket money for the next nine weeks."

"C'mon, Dad! That's not fair —"

"How is it not fair?" This was not one of those rhetorical questions — it was one of the other ones, the ones that were supposed to be answered, even if James didn't really have an answer to give.

"He wasn't even gonna make us pay for it," James muttered, kicking at the sidewalk. "You talked him into it – why not take something for free if it's offered?"

"Because the money isn't the issue," his dad said firmly, "and I've had enough free handouts in my life." He stood then, brushing off the knees of his robes, and steered James with one hand on his shoulder down the street. James let himself be led along, still smarting from the punishment, but his dad's words had made him wonder.

"Why wasn't that guy gonna make you pay?" he asked.

"Maybe because he recognized that young boys can be careless and thoughtless on occasion?"

"No, because it was when he saw it was you," James stressed. "Did you know him?"

"No," his dad said shortly.

"But he knew you?" James asked. His dad sighed.

"Yes."

"How did he know you if you didn't know him?" James said, pushing for answers. "Are you, like, famous? Because," – he was gathering steam now, putting things together – "people recognize you all the time, lots of people, and I thought you just knew them all, but you don't, do you? So what—"

"James," his dad interrupted, "if you want a ride home, I suggest you stop talking, focus, and hold on tight."

"I don't think I do want a ride home," James muttered, "since you're just gonna sit me down with Mum and make me have a serious conversation."

"Hang on," his dad said, and James wrapped his arms around his father's waist, feeling the familiar tug and pull of Side-Along Apparition. They appeared in their garden, and his dad marched him straight into the kitchen.

"Hello," James's mother said when they entered. "You're home a bit early, aren't you?"

"Yes," his father said. "We are. And James has something to tell you, don't you, James?"

"Yeah," James said immediately. "Dad won't tell me why he's famous."

His mother's eyebrows shot up, even as his dad said, "Not was I was referring to, James."

In the end, just as James had feared, they sat down and had a long, serious conversation that answered his mum and dad's questions, but none of his own, and if James hadn't been a master-class sneaker, he wouldn't have found anything out.

But that night, after he and Al and Lily were all in bed and supposed to be asleep, James sneaked from his room and down the hall, to listen at the crack under his parents' bedroom door. He'd seen enough that afternoon to guess that his parents would be talking about him after they'd gone to bed, and he was right.

"Harry, you have to tell him sometime," James heard his mother say. "He's started asking questions; he's not going to accept being kept ignorant for much longer. More than that, he deserves to know, and more than _that_ , he needs to know. He can't go to Hogwarts being the only person who doesn't know who Harry Potter is."

"Why not? I did," James heard his dad say, and he was pretty sure it was a joke; it sounded like what he'd heard his Aunt Hermione call 'dry humor' once.

"Harry," his mother said simply, and his dad sighed a heavy sigh that James could hear even through the closed door.

"We've got a year before he leaves for Hogwarts, Gin. I'm not going to send him out into the world not knowing, I just . . . I want him to have more time to be himself before he's thrust into a world where he will be defined by who his father is."

"And when he was too young to know to ask questions, that was reasonable, but he's started to put things together now, and you _know_ your son, Harry. He's not going to rest until he gets answers. Wouldn't you rather they came from you?"

"I'd rather have it not matter in the slightest who James's father happens to be!" James's dad muttered then, and the intensity of the words scared James a little. For the first time, he felt like maybe this wasn't a conversation he wanted to hear. Dread slowly started to replace the determination to know things that had brought him here in the first place.

"Unfortunately," his mother said softly, "we don't live in a perfect world. Isn't it better that we take the time to prepare him for the reality of being Harry Potter's son?"

That was when James left. He left because there was something ominous and terrifying in the way his mother had said 'Harry Potter's son,' and suddenly, James hadn't wanted to know why his father was famous, what he had done, what James would apparently have to live up to. He got next to no sleep that night thinking about it, and in the morning, when his father approached him over breakfast with a serious look on his face and said, "James, I've been thinking about what you wanted to know yesterday," James was so overcome with panic that he blurted out, "No, Dad, not a big deal, don't worry about it," and all but fled the table rather than hear his dad out.

James hated himself for this display of cowardice almost as soon as he'd made his retreat, and he really couldn't explain or name or understand the deep-rooted fear that had suddenly cropped up around this issue. He thought about going back to his father and apologizing and telling him that of course he wanted to talk about this, and that he would listen to whatever his dad had to say — but then he remembered his mother saying "Harry Potter's son," and the panic returned, and James knew he couldn't do it.

In the end, he found out from Molly and Fred.

James's cousins Molly and Fred were his best friends. They told each other everything, and they were both smart and observant, and if anyone knew anything and would tell him the absolute, honest truth, it was Molly and Fred.

And so, when they all gathered at the Burrow for Christmas, James's first act was to pull his cousins away somewhere private (easier said than done, but the three of them were well-versed in finding nooks and crannies) and demand, "Do you two know why my dad is famous?"

Molly and Fred looked momentarily surprised, and then exchanged _A Look_ , and this was the worst kind of _Look_ , because it was the Silent Communication Look. He and Molly and Fred had perfected it, and they used it all the time, but this time, it was being used _without_ him. He shoved both of them, real panic welling up in him now.

"Stop that," he said, and was slightly ashamed at how shrill his voice came out. They looked back at him, both apologetic, but Molly more so. She couldn't hold James's gaze, and she glanced back at Fred after about a second, a glance that he returned, and they were doing it _again_. "I said, _stop_!" James insisted. "What do you know?"

It was a demand, but it wasn't answered. Molly just twisted her hands in her lap and stared at them, and that was terrifying, because this was _Molly_ , all confidence and sass and _not_ this kind of nervous uncertainty.

"I'm not supposed to tell you," she said in an apologetic voice, and James didn't understand.

"What are you talking about?" he demanded, and Molly took a deep breath.

"My dad said your dad wanted to tell you himself, so I'm not supposed to talk about it, especially not to you."

This was mind-boggling. James couldn't get his head around it. "And you?" he asked, turning on Fred, who lifted his hands in defense.

"Hey, I hardly know anything," he said quickly. "Your dad's famous because of the war, just like your mom and Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron, but he's the most famous, that's really all I know."

James knew about the war, of course. Everybody knew about the war. There were ceremonies every year that James never went to, though he knew his parents didd, and his cousin Victoire was in a photograph or something, and all the aunts and uncles and grandma and grandpa had fought in it, and Uncle George's twin brother had died in the fight. He knew that. And he felt a sense of relief, because maybe that's all this was.

"So he's a war hero?" James asked, feeling calmer now. "I mean, he's head of the Aurors, so that makes sense. If that's all it is—"

"It's not."

Molly's voice was very small, very quiet. "It's a lot more than that, James. Your dad was famous long before the war. Your dad was famous when he was a baby. They called him The Boy Who Lived because Lord Voldemort tried to kill him and couldn't. And he got other names, later. The Chosen One. The Savior."

The dread was back now, in full force. "Tell me," he said. Molly took another deep breath.

"My dad's gonna kill me," she said, sounding terrified.

"Molly," he said, as serious as he'd ever been, reaching out to take her hand, which was practically unprecedented given that she was a girl. "Please. I have to know."

So she told him. She told him everything. Everything his dad had done, been known for, all the times he'd almost died and fought dark wizards and saved the world before he was even done with school. And the more James heard, the more icy cold he got.

 _Harry Potter's son_. His mother's words echoed in his head. He was Harry Potter's son. He was the son of a man who had done more of importance at 15 months old than James had accomplished in his entire ten years of existence.

 _How_ on earth was James _ever_ supposed to measure up to everything his father had done? People would expect Harry Potter's son to be extraordinary. And James wasn't. He was just a kid with a penchant for mischief. He didn't know how to be the son of the Savior of the Wizarding World. And even if he did learn how to do it, he doubted very much his ability to pull it off.

The son of the man Molly was describing, or at least who James imagined the world would expect that son to be, sounded more like Al than like James, quiet, studious Al, who liked to read and learn things, who never got bored or got into trouble, who had a habit of saying things that the adults called 'deep,' who had what Grandma Weasley called 'an old soul.'

Surely that's who everyone would be expecting, someone smart and well-behaved, who understood things the first time he read them, who didn't goof off during lessons and rely on remembering what was said aloud because the printed words didn't always sit on the page like they were supposed to.

Al was who they would want, Al or someone brave, some extraordinarily talented wizard who would dazzle the teachers and students alike with his magnificent abilities, and that just wasn't James.

James wasn't anything extraordinary. He was just a kid who could fly pretty well, a trouble-maker who could make people laugh.

 _But maybe_ , he thought suddenly that night as he was lying in bed unable to sleep, _maybe that's the key._ He sat up in his cot, his mind working overtime. _Maybe you can be someone else. Maybe if you and Molly and Fred create some huge, impressive bit of mayhem right when you first get to Hogwarts, and make sure everyone knows it was you, something clever, not just chaotic, maybe that will work._

He fell asleep that night, half-formed pranks flying through his head, rehearsing the best way to float the idea to get Molly and Fred on board, confident in this plan. They'd make a name for themselves, be the next Weasley twins, following in the footsteps of the Mauraders. That would be their identity. That would be _his_ identity.

Because if he could get everyone to see him as a trickster like his namesakes, just another boy with a penchant for mischief, then maybe he could escape ever having to figure out how to be Harry Potter's son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> James is a fascinating figure for me because he is so often portrayed as nothing more than a trickster like his namesakes. And I'm guilty of that too - that's how I wrote him in the Roses trilogy, which was my first exploration of this universe. And so, when I started trying to figure out his moment, I wanted to find a way to give him more depth than just the eternal trickster.
> 
> This was that solution - he's not just a trickster; he's a boy who creates an identity as just a trickster because he's terrified of failing to live up to his father's legacy. He works around that fear by removing it - he'll focus on living up to a different legacy, one more easily in his reach. Also, I think this is a James who acknowledges (to himself alone) that his little brother is far smarter than he is. My James has mild dyslexia; a good enough memory that he can compensate for it, but it still makes him feel stupid on occasion, and it's going to make him rubbish at classes like Potions, and he's not going to touch Ancient Runes with a twelve-foot pole.
> 
> He's also going to continue to struggle with his identity and being Harry Potter's son for a long time - but that's a story that will come later.


	5. Molly Weasley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I own nothing and Maggie is awesome.
> 
> And if Molly seems a bit too old for eight, excuse it away by virtue of being Percy's daughter. :)

_Molly_

As a little girl, Molly Weasley had gorgeous, long red ringlets that were the envy of every little girl her age.

When she was seven, she cut them off in a fit of spite.

When Molly's mother, shocked, asked why, her response was incensed and immediate: "Because Fred and James said they make me look like a girl!"

And from that time on, Molly's fiery red hair was kept short. At that length, it couldn't curl, though it still wanted to, and so it just stuck up every which way, an image Molly helped along. And once the curls were gone, Molly presented her parents with a list of all the other adornments she wanted removed from her life and wardrobe — ribbons, bows, lace, sparkles, frills, ruffles, dresses, and pink. In short, anything and everything that attributed 'girl' to her in any way.

Molly Weasley was the textbook definition of a tomboy. She hated tea parties, dress-up, and anything related to princesses. She much preferred to spend her time making mud pies, climbing trees, and trying to convince her aunts and uncles to let her try out their broomsticks. She refused to wear shoes from May til September, and every single item of clothing she owned had a grass stain or mud on it somewhere. This was how Molly wanted it, and her parents, though slightly bewildered by the sudden reality that they didn't have the daughter they'd thought they had, let her put away the frilly dresses and be who she wanted to be.

At the age of seven, Molly had believed that getting rid of the curls and dresses would do the trick with James and Fred, but even after her hair had been chopped off and she'd started running around in overalls, her cousins James and Fred were a constant source of frustration for the young girl, and not for the reason why they were a constant source of frustration for everyone else in the family.

Molly was four months younger than James and just one month older than Fred, so by all rights, she should have fallen right in with them. But James and Fred were adamant that they would have nothing whatsoever to do with girls in any capacity.

James and Fred were widely acknowledged to be the trouble-makers in the family (And no wonder, the adults all said amongst themselves, given their namesakes), but Molly saw them for what they were: small time. It was all throwing mud at the girls and dropping Dumgbombs and hiding worms and frogs under pillows – boy stuff, gross, dirty, and entirely lacking in finesse. They did what came into their heads as soon as it did, all noise and mess and nuisance. No subtlety. No creativity. It was almost a crime.

Molly knew that James and Fred's refusal to let her play with them because she was a girl stemmed entirely from the fact that they were boys and therefore inherently stupid, but it didn't make her feel any less lonely.

Finally, the start of the summer that she turned eight, Molly decided to take things into her own hands. Her father always said you could do anything you put your mind to with patience, determination, and a good enough reason, so Molly squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and approached James and Fred where they sat playing Exploding Snap under a sycamore tree in Grandma Weasley's backyard.

"Can I play?" she asked. The boys looked at her, then at each other, then burst out laughing.

"No," said James, turning back to the game.

"C'mon, why not?" Molly asked.

"Because we don't play with girls," Fred told her, grinning at James. Molly scowled.

"That's a stupid reason," she told them. "I can play Exploding Snap as good as either of you!"

"No, you can't," James said. "You're too busy playing with your tea set and dolls."

"Yeah, and your dress-up," Fred added, and the boys laughed again.

Molly's hands balled into fists at her side. "Just 'cause I'm a girl doesn't mean I can't play cards or fly a broomstick or pull pranks just as good —"

"Yeah, sure, Molly," James said with a grin to Fred, like they were sharing a good joke, like she'd said something funny.

"C'mon, James," Fred said, standing and gathering the cards. "Let's go."

And with a last laugh at her expense, the boys ran off. Molly watched them go, hands still balled into fists, cool hard anger settling down inside her. "Well, I guess we'll see about that," she said to their retreating backs. "Won't we, boys?"

Patience and determination and a good enough reason, that's what her dad always said you needed. She'd always had the patience and the determination, and now the boys had given her the reason.

She started small. Little things here and there, thoughtless things, careless things that everyone assigned to James and Fred automatically, and that James and Fred couldn't refute because they honestly couldn't remember if they'd done them or not. Things like leaving the back door open, tracking mud on the carpet, forgetting to latch the chicken coop.

Then she moved on to slightly more intrusive things - frogs in people's shoes, cookies snitched from the kitchen counter, common items likes keys and quills and once or twice someone's wand moved from one side of a room to the other when no one was looking - deeds that would have been attributed to a poltergeist if the Burrow had had one and if James and Fred hadn't been notorious for such antics.

She did these things carefully and methodically, paying close attention to what James and Fred were doing on their own, listening for the murmurs of the aunts and uncles growing more and more frustrated, timing her actions for when they would cause the most irritation.

And she eavesdropped on the boys, as they planned their "big" pranks of the summer, and she planned ones to match - nothing too clever, nothing too elaborate, nothing close to what she was capable of, but she had to match the boys' reputation. So she balanced buckets of water over partially opened doors and she froze spiders in ice cubes and she rigged the tops of the salt shakers to come off whenever used. The Burrow echoed with frustrated shouts of "James!" and "Fred!" and Molly smiled gleefully to herself each time she heard such a shout.

And meanwhile, James and Fred played, unknowingly, right into her hands by being their usual irritating selves and not paying attention to anything else. Because they just went about their business as usual, and had no idea that the adults thought they were being twice as troublesome as normal.

But the coup de grace came three weeks into the summer. Molly had overheard (by virtue of climbing the massive sycamore tree right outside the boys' window) that James and Fred planned to cause a huge mess in the front of the house as a diversion, then sneak their mothers' racing brooms out of the broomshed and take them for a spin around the orchard.

Now, Molly could see any number of issues with this plan, and knew that the boys would probably manage to get caught all on their own, but there was no harm in ensuring it, and there was no harm in making sure Aunt Ginny and Aunt Angelina were already hopping mad when they discovered their sons sneaking out of the broomshed, top-of-the-line racing brooms in tow.

It was easy - almost insultingly easy. She merely re-rigged their mess to go off three minutes earlier and redirected it toward the far side of the house, so that when the parents followed the trail back to the source, they would come around the back corner just in time to see the boys closing the broomshed door behind them. After that, all Molly had to do was climb to her hidden perch in the sycamore tree and watch it all unfold.

And it unfolded _beautifully_. Aunt Ginny and Aunt Angelina read the boys the riot act, citing all the mayhem that had been caused by them and by Molly over the past few weeks, and when the boys, in outraged confusion, denied those things they hadn't done, it set their mothers off all over again. Molly lay back against a branch and grinned vindictively.

The riot act ended with James and Fred's broomstick privileges being taken away for two weeks, and they also had to spend the next five days scrubbing the Burrow from top to bottom, starting with the mess they'd made of the front yard.

Immediately, though, they were sent to their room and magically warded against mischief (a handy spell Uncle George was currently in the process of refining and patenting). It didn't stop them from talking in outraged tones about the unfairness of their punishment and who could possibly be behind the things they hadn't done.

Molly knew a cue when she heard one, and when Fred said, "Things like that don't just happen, though! Somebody has to be behind it, and I think somebody's framing us!" and James said, "Okay, but who?," Molly took the opportunity to swing in through their open window.

"Hello, boys," she said with a smile. Their reactions were priceless.

"You!" Fred breathed in an accusatory manner.

"No," James said immediately, refusing to believe it.

"Who else?" Fred asked James, then turned to her and said, "Did you?"

"Who, me?" Molly replied, all innocence. "A girl?"

Fred had the decency to look a little embarrassed, but James's eyes narrowed. "What are you playing at?" he asked, and Molly continued to feign innocence.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, pretending to examine her nails for dirt with an air of utter nonchalance.

"Are you the one who's been framing us?" James demanded, and Molly just stared the two of them down.

"How?" Fred asked then, and Molly snorted.

"Please," she said with all the eight-year-old disdain she could muster. "Like it was hard."

James looked downright offended by this statement, but Fred seemed to consider Molly, _really_ consider her, for the first time. James noticed. "Fred," he hissed, "don't you dare."

"What do you want?" Fred asked her.

"I want in," Molly said simply, ready to negotiate.

"No way," James said immediately. "We'll tell. We'll tell them it was you."

"No, you won't," Molly countered. "And even if you did, who'd believe you? All the stuff you've pulled on me?"

"She's right," Fred said to James.

"Fred, don't you dare," James warned. "Stay with me! She can't keep this up all summer. She's got nothing."

"I wonder," Molly said slowly, "just how much trouble you two would have to cause before your parents took away your tickets to the Quidditch League Finals at the end of the summer." She pretended to give the matter serious thought as the color drained from the boys' faces. "This is an interesting thought experiment. I will have to consider it carefully."

"You wouldn't," Fred said. Molly fixed him with a piercing gaze.

"Wouldn't even be a challenge," she said in a pointed voice, all mercy gone.

They stared each other down for a long moment, until finally, Fred nodded. "Okay," was all he said, but Molly knew she had won.

"Fred, no!" James said in shock. "She's a girl!"

"She's not a girl, she's a criminal mastermind," Fred countered with something like fearful respect in his voice. "And I'm not losing my ticket to the Finals." They held a brief and silent conversation, then James, against his will, turned to Molly.

"You'll admit it was you, if we let you in?" he asked. Molly laughed.

"Not likely," she said without hesitation. "But in the future, you'll have me working with you instead of against you. I've done this all summer, and not only not been caught, no one even suspects me. You two might actually amount to something, with me as your friend. Take it or leave it."

James and Fred may have lacked finesse, but they weren't idiots. They knew when they were beat.

And that's how Molly Weasley joined ranks with the boys. Nothing was quite the same after that, and it took the extended Weasley family a while to understand exactly what had hit them. Percy tried to believe for a long time that Molly was just an unwitting accomplice in the boys' schemes, but in his heart, he knew what everyone else soon came to know: Molly Weasley was, in fact, a criminal mastermind.

"After all," George Weasley said to Percy, putting it best, "she's combining the boys' love of mischief with your brain for planning, Perce. I give her fifteen years to achieve world domination, and Merlin help us all when those three get to Hogwarts."

Hogwarts, like the Weasley family, wouldn't know what hit it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a lot of fun writing this Molly, largely because I love giving Percy daughters so completely unlike himself, though Molly is what Percy could have become if the twins had ever been able to corrupt him. She has all her father's intelligence and cunning , and one of the first things I knew about her was that she would fall in with James and Fred, the brains behind the pranks, and Percy would try so hard to believe that she was just following the boys' lead, but he knew his daughter far too well for that to work.
> 
> I'm also very interested in who this Molly grows into, and the role she plays in this trio as all of its members grow older, but that is a question and a consideration for later, when these three get their own, longer, spin-off story.


	6. Fred Weasley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This monstrosity of a chapter is for Maggie, who has waited so long, so almost patiently, for me to finish Fred's story.

_Fred_  
  
Fred figured out pretty early on that he didn’t come from the most traditional of families. He could remember his parents’ wedding, for one thing, and he knew for a fact most kids couldn’t say that. But he could remember the day his parents got married, and not vaguely, either. He’d been five.  
  
And it wasn’t like his friend Simon, whose real parents had gotten divorced and then his mother married someone else. No, in Fred’s case it was his parents, his _actual_ parents, and they’d all been a family since Fred was born. They just didn’t get married until he was five.  
  
He knew it was unusual, but he never really cared. It hadn’t mattered to him. In fact, it had never even been anything he thought about until he was six and he’d overheard a conversation between his grandparents when he was staying at their house the way he did every year when March turned to April.  
  
“Molly, you know how hard this time of year is for them,” Grandda had said.  
  
“It’s hard for _all_ of us, Arthur,” had been Gran’s reply.  
  
“Yes,” Grandda’s tone had been patient but firm, “but especially for them. We have to let them work it through in their own way and their own time.”  
  
“I just worry about them,” his Gran had said, so quietly Fred almost hadn’t heard it. “Sometimes I think Freddie’s the only thing holding the two of them together. A blessed little accident, that child.”  
  
He hadn’t known what to make of that, because how could a little kid be an accident? He _caused_ accidents, sure, plenty of them (even more when James was around). Every once in a while he _had_ accidents. But _being_ an accident? That didn’t make sense.  
  
He'd already known that in most families, the mum and dad got married before they had kids. But he hadn't realized that most families celebrated the parents' birthdays as much as the kid's. His birthday was the only one celebrated in his house. He _thought_ he knew when Mama's birthday was, and he was pretty sure Dad's was the week he always spent with Gran and Grandda Weasley, but there had never been cake or a party, and if gifts were given, he'd never been told.  
  
He also noticed that there usually wasn't a lot of time between brothers and sisters -- three or four years at most. But he was seven and a quarter when his little sister Roxanne was born, and that was older than anybody else in his family had been when they'd had little siblings. James had had two by the time they were four!  
  
But maybe the biggest difference -- and the one that came closest to making him jealous of all those other kids -- was that most families didn't seem to have Angry Months.  
  
Fred hated the spring. And he hated the end of winter, too, because December was an Angry Month, and so was April and so was May, which meant that January and February and March were Angry Months, too, months when his parents got dark and folded and there was lots of shouting and fighting on his parents' end and lots of hiding and covering his ears on Fred's. The week he spent at Gran and Grandda's was like an oasis, a chance for the fearful knot inside him to untie itself a little. But it didn't ever really go away because Fred knew that staying at the Burrow meant the worst was coming, because April was the angriest Angry Month of all.  
  
It wasn't as bad as it sounded when he thought it like that; Fred knew that. Because not all of December was Angry, and neither was all of May, and January and February weren't nearly as bad as March and April, and the rest of the year was fine and unshadowed and almost normal.  
  
But Fred hated the Angry Months, and he didn't understand why his family had them when no one else did, but he didn't know how to tell anyone about them, because what if no one else knew that Angry Months were a thing? If they were only a part of his family, how would anyone else know what he was talking about?  
  
When he was little, he spent the Angry Months hiding from his parents, avoiding them, trying not to make them angrier. He did everything he could to put happy things in the house -- pictures, notes, flowers if any were growing -- and sometimes it worked. Sometimes, he caught his parents on a good day and made them smile and the Angry Months almost weren't for a moment.  
  
But sometimes, lots of times, there wasn't anything he could do about the yelling. And on those days, he hid under his bed, his hands pressed against his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, and he waited for it to end, worrying all the time that if he was the accident that had made them a family, maybe he was the only reason they still were. Maybe if he hadn't been there, his parents would have gone away from each other and maybe found a way to be not so angry. Maybe, he thought when the yelling was loudest and his thoughts were the darkest, maybe his parents knew that too, and that's why they were so angry -- because they knew they wouldn't be if he wasn't there making them be a family.  
  
He was eight when the Angry Months started to infect him, too, when he first felt a spark of his own anger rather than just worry and anxiety and fear. He had started trying to make a list of the things his parents argued about during the Angry Months, because he thought that maybe he could make some of them go away. So he started washing the dishes and cleaning his room and dusting the furniture (as well as an eight-year-old could) and giving his dad fifteen minute reminders before dinner so he could wrap up what he was doing in the shop. He did it all, preventing messes instead of making them for the first time in his life, and it hadn't made any difference. If the dishes were clean, his parents argued about the undone laundry. If his father made it up to dinner on time, his mother shouted at him for coming home smelling like sulfur or soot or gunpowder, and it was all so _stupid_!  
  
_It's like they're_ looking _for things to fight about_ , he thought angrily one night as he listened to his parents shouting over why Roxie hadn't been fed on time, and with that thought came Fred's first spark of anger -- anger at his parents, anger at their fighting, anger at the fact that their yelling was now making Roxie feel as scared and upset as he used to.  
  
_It's not_ fair _!_ he shouted inside his head, and he resolved to do something about it, once and for all.  
  
He'd only wanted to get their attention. He hadn't meant to send a curio cabinet in their living room crashing to the floor. But he had. And the silence in the room after the crash had been deafening – for a moment. Then his parents had started yelling at him.  
  
_How_ could he be so careless, _what_ was he thinking, was he _trying_ to get himself grounded, they let him get away with quite a lot but senseless destruction was not acceptable, it went on and on, and Fred just stood there, speechless because it was not how he’d envisioned the moment going.  
  
And at first he thought to be even angrier, because it had been an _accident_ , and couldn’t they tell accidents from the things he did on purpose? But then, he realized something, something incredibly important.  
  
They weren’t yelling at each other.  
  
They were still yelling, they were still angry, but at him, and more than that, they were yelling _together_ at him, and they weren’t yelling at each other. So he set his jaw stubbornly and acted like he’d meant to do it and let them yell themselves hoarse and send him to his room.  
  
Door slammed shut, he held his breath and waiting for the fighting to resume — but it didn’t. Silence fell over the house, and he released that breath into the silence, exhausted from the tension, a plan already half-formed in his head. He couldn’t say he liked the plan very much. He couldn’t say it wasn’t, on some level, a really dumb idea. But if it worked, if it would keep his parents from spending so much of their time yelling at each other, then it would be worth it. He had to believe that. Because it was all he had.  
  
The plan became his Secret Weapon. He pulled it out whenever the shouting became too much. Whenever he felt so tense he thought his arms might shatter. Whenever he saw Roxie take to hiding under her bed. Whenever his own anger started to boil over inside of him. Then he’d unleash the Secret Weapon, destroy something, cause some massive piece of trouble, push just the right button to set his parents off on him.  
  
He _hated_ being yelled at and punished and having to keep quit when his parent demanded to know why he was acting like this, but he grit his teeth together and repeated over and over and over, _It’s better this way. It’s better this way. It’s better this way_.  
  
He made it two Angry Month cycles without being found out. It had been in his favor that the Angry Months usually ended before summer got started full swing, so the punishments he had to endure very rarely affected his time with James and Molly. It had been in his favor that the Angry Months ended before he and Molly and James could make their own mischief.  
  
He and Molly and James had big plans for the summer Fred would turn ten. They’d all be in double digits, and that meant they’d be big kids, finally. They had every minute of every day from May til August planned out, and the start of the summer was a huge camp-out they’d finally managed to convince their parents to let them do alone (or mostly alone. They wouldn’t be going too far from the Burrow, and they’d still be within range of supervision, but those were just details).  
  
Fred knew how important the camp-out was to James and Molly; heck, it was important to him, too, and he’d promised himself that he’d be on his best behavior in May, no matter how bad things got at home, because he knew it would be the first thing his Mum and Dad took away.  
  
But it had been _bad_. One of the worst arguments he could ever remember his parents getting into. He’d tried everything he could think of to drown it out, but nothing worked, and Roxie had been _crying_ , she was so scared, and she was _two_ , and she shouldn’t have to deal with that, and what could he say to make it better? She could barely string a sentence together, but she begged him to make it stop. What was he supposed to do?  
  
He flooded his dad’s workshop. He stuffed the sink full of play-doh and turned the taps on full force and watched as the water gushed over the edge, spilling onto the floor. And then he pushed half-finished projects into the mess, scattered notes and journals into the water, destroying them, crying tears he couldn’t help because he knew he was kissing his perfect summer goodbye.  
  
He’d never been yelled at the way he was yelled at that night. It wasn’t just the camp-out they took away; it was everything. He was under lock and key from that moment until the end of the summer, and the worst part of the punishment was when they made him tell James and Molly why he wouldn’t be joining them. James looked hurt and confused and Molly looked murderous, and Fred hated the Angry Months more in that moment than he ever had before.  
  
Fred was put into a room by himself after that, but there was only so much that could be done to keep Molly Weasley out of a place she wanted to get to, so it wasn’t long before she and James were climbing in through the window and she was demanding, “I don’t buy it, Fred, I don’t buy any of that crap you just told us. You _know_ how important this summer was, you wouldn’t just throw that away, so what’s really going on?”  
          
“Nothing,” he said sullenly, trying to sink into the bed, away from her gaze, wishing they’d both just leave him alone to be miserable by himself. He did manage to turn away from her, but she put a forceful arm on his shoulder and turned him right back. Glaring at her, he sat up, massaging the spot where her arm and clenched. “What do you want from me?” he asked angrily.  
  
“The truth!” Molly demanded, just as angry. “We’re your friends, aren’t we? Best friends? That means no secrets!”  
  
“Moll, calm down,” James said, stepping between the two of them. “Yelling isn’t gonna help, okay?”  
  
For some reason, James’s words hurt worst of all. Fred could feel tears stinging his eyes again, and he _hated_ it, because it was _embarrassing_. He was almost ten years old, for Merlin’s sake!  
  
“Fred?” James said then, and if he saw the tears (and Fred knew he did), he didn’t act like he did, for which Fred was eternally grateful. “You can tell us. I know you, I know how excited you were for this summer. You wouldn’t just forget about it. I heard your dad talking about what you did. It was too deliberate. You had a reason. I know you did.”  
  
“You don’t understand!” Fred said, almost panicking. “I had to, James. I _had_ to!”  
  
“Had to what?”  
  
Fred looked back and forth between the two of them, and he felt sick to his stomach with everything churning around inside him. And he didn’t think he could keep this secret to himself anymore, but he couldn’t let his parents find out. He just _couldn’t_. So he said, “You have to promise not to tell. I mean it. Not _anyone_.”    James promised immediately, but Molly hesitated. Fred fixed her with a steely gaze. “Promise, or I’m not saying _anything_ ,” he hissed through clenched teeth.  
  
“Fine,” she said, but she didn’t look happy about it. “I promise.”  
  
“Not your parents or your sister or my parents or _anyone_ ,” Fred stressed.  
  
“I promise!” she said, impatient. “Now will you tell us what it is you _had_ to do?”  

She made it sound so simple, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t simple at all. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done.  
  
“My parents argue,” he said, and Molly interrupted him.  
  
“Yeah, so do mine.”  
  
“No, they don’t,” he said with a shake of her head, trying to make her understand. “Not like mine. Mine fight _all the time_. They’re always yelling, and the only way to make them stop is to make them mad at me.”  
  
He once he’d told them that, the rest of it followed, all of it, just spilling out of him in a tirade he hadn’t known was waiting to be unleashed. Nobody said anything when he was finished. None of them had anything to say. The whole situation was so beyond what ten-year-olds should have to deal with, and part of Fred knew that, but it was one of those things he just couldn’t think about.  
  
“You’d better go,” Fred said finally. “You’re not supposed to be in here. Go, and get ready for the camp out.” They both started talking at that, tried to say that there was no way they were doing it without him, but he cut them off. “No,” he said in a hard voice. “Go. Don’t give up our perfect summer for me. You guys have fun. Promise.”  
  
Miserably, they did, and Fred watched them climb out the window, back toward wherever they were supposed to be. He could feel the anger and unfairness boiling up in him again, but he was scared to let it out because he honestly didn't know if he would end up throwing something or crying, and he was not about to start crying again.  
  
His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the doorframe, and opened the door to see both his parents standing in the hall. Sullenly, he crossed his arms. "What?" he asked shortly.  
  
"Fred," his mother said. "We need to talk."  
  
"About what?" Fred demanded. "We already talked about the workshop, and I haven't done anything since then!"  
  
"Fred, please don't yell at your mother," his dad said quietly, and Fred had to forcefully bite back his angry _Why not? You do_. "We need to talk about something more important than the workshop."  
  
_Here it comes,_ Fred thought dully and sullenly. _'Your behavior is unacceptable.' 'We deserve your respect.' Another lecture that I'm just gonna have to nod and smile through because they don't get it and they never will._  
  
"Fred,” his mother said gently, and Fred braced himself. “Have you been acting out to get your father and I to stop fighting?"  
  
The words were so unexpected that he stepped back with the blow of them, full of shock and anger and pain that he couldn't even think about masking. "Molly _told_ you?" he forced out, his whole body stinging from the betrayal. She'd _promised_ \---  
  
"Relax, Fred," his dad said, cutting through the fog. "Your cousin didn't give you up. Your Uncle Percy overheard your conversation. He told us. Molly still has your back."  
  
The flash of fury he'd felt toward Molly drained away, but he couldn't relax as his dad had told him to do; the one thing he'd wanted his parents to never find out had still be revealed to them, and now he was gonna have to have the conversation he would give anything to avoid.  
  
He stared at his hands, refusing to look at them, refusing to speak to them. If they wanted to do this, they were going to have to talk first.       
  
“Fred,” his dad said, and it was clear from just that one word that his dad didn’t have any better idea what to say than James or Molly had, and that should have made him feel better, but it didn’t. “Fred,” his dad tried again, and then it was like some barrier of forced calm broke down, because the next words were heated and came out in a rush: “How do you not _tell_ us this?”  
  
“George,” Fred’s mum said, in her warning voice.  
  
“No, Ang,” he said. “How do you not _talk_ to us about this, Fred? How do you not tell us that you feel this way?”  
  
“ _Because I shouldn’t have to_!”  
  
The words explode out of him, and in the end, that’s what sends him over the edge. In all the years he’d put up with the fighting, the screaming, the yelling, both in the background and directed at him, the one thing he’d never dared do was yell back. That was no longer true. A floodgate of his own had opened, and there was no closing it now.  
  
“I shouldn’t have to _tell_ you! I shouldn’t have to let you know that when you fight and yell and scream all the time, that I _hate_ it! I shouldn’t have to tell you that living in a house where you are _so_ angry _so_ much of the time is _awful_ , and that I feel like I can’t move or breathe for five months out of every year! You should know all that, you should be able to figure that out, shouldn’t that be common sense? Why is it my job to tell you that I don’t want to hear my parents yelling at each other all the time? Why is that up to me? _You’re_ the parents! _You’re_ the adults! I’m _nine_ years old, and it’s been this way as long as I can remember, and I hate it! I _hate_ it, and I don’t understand _why_ , if you’re _so angry_ with each other, why you don’t just —”  
  
The thought was there, but he couldn’t finish it, couldn’t say it out loud, both because that would make it too real and because he was too worked up to say anymore. He was breathing hard and his throat was raw from the screaming and his eyes burned, and he just couldn’t anymore. He stood there in his room, with his eyes screwed shut and his breath coming in shuddering gasps and his frozen parents staring at him and not making a move and not saying anything.  
  
“Well, fuck,” his dad finally said into the silence, and Fred’s eyes flew open at that, because cursing was Not Allowed in their house, certainly not _that_ word, no matter how angry his parents got, and Fred’s eyes went to his mother, waiting for her to scold his dad, to reprimand him, but she was just standing there looking at him with tears in her eyes, sadder than he’d ever seen her.  
  
“No,” she said softly, in response to the question he hadn’t asked. “That about covers it, I think.” And that was Fred’s first real indication that something Serious had just happened.  
  
He watched his dad turn to his mum then, and right in front of him, they had a Silent Conversation, which floored Fred because he hadn’t known his parents could do that. And when they had finished, his mother sat on the edge of the bed and his dad pulled the desk chair around and sat in it backwards, and Fred awkwardly sat at the head of the bed, trying to get his bearings. He had no idea what to expect.  
      
“Fred,” his dad said in a quiet and strange voice. “Fred, it’s time we told you something important, something we probably should have told you before now.”  
  
The words made Fred go cold all over. Sure, he’d thought them, alone in his room some nights, wondering why his parent didn’t just split up, wondering if maybe that wouldn’t make them happier, but he didn’t want them to actually _do_ it, not really, not for real. They were his _parents_. How could they keep being that if they —  
  
“You aren’t, you aren’t really, are you?” he managed to make himself ask, and his dad looked confused, _confused_ , of all emotions, like he didn’t know what Fred was talking about, like he hadn’t just brought it up himself —  
  
And then Fred heard his mum make a little sound of recognition, and then she was beside him on the bed, her arm rubbing circles on his back as she said, “Oh, Fred, baby, no. No, it’s not that. Your dad and I are not getting a divorce.”  
  
His dad made the connection, then, between what he’d said and what Fred had thought, and he let out a stream of cursing that started with “Bloody hell” and ended with “goddamn,” all of which led Fred’s mother to say, with gentle reproof, “George. Can we not?”  
  
The world righted itself after that, and Fred felt a little more like there was solid ground under him, and he was able to gulp in a deep breath or two and get himself back under control as his dad stopped cursing and did the same.  
  
“Fred,” his dad said again, and now his tone was different, more straightforward, and the words he said were the same. “What you already know, and I know you do, is that your mum and I never planned to be parents. You came along and pushed us into parenthood. And it doesn’t mean we love you any less, and it doesn’t mean you aren’t the best thing that could have happened to us, but becoming parents was not something we decided to do when we felt ready. It was something that happened and we had to scramble to get ready. And I’m not sure we ever really made it. The truth, Freddie, that you need to know is that kids think, and parents want kids to think, that their parents have everything figured out, that they know all the answers, that they’re in control. And I don’t know, maybe other parents are, but your mum and I aren’t. We’re making this up as we go along. Fred, the truth is, you don't have the best parents in the world. You probably deserve better than us. But the universe took two broken people and asked them to raise a child. And we do the best we can, but I know we fall short.”  
  
Fred looked to his mother then, to see if she would argue or refute anything his dad had said. He didn’t know what to think, not yet, and he wanted to see what his mum had to add.  
  
"Your dad's right," his mum said. "And he puts it . . . very well. But Freddie, never doubt, not for one minute, that you are the best thing that ever happened to us. Without you, we wouldn't be sitting here, we wouldn't be a family. You are what cemented us into place way back at the start. You helped us rebuild something that I thought was broken between your dad and I forever. You gave us that, Fred, just by being born. You made us a family. But we are still a family not just because we love you, and Roxie, but because your dad and I love each other, and we want to be a family."  
  
His parents were being so honest with him that Fred felt comfortable saying, "It doesn't feel like it." He felt both his parents sigh and glance away at that, almost guilty.  
  
"No," his dad said after a beat. "I don't imagine it does, sometimes.”  
  
They talked for a long time that afternoon, about an awful lot of things, and what Fred was struck by was that his parents had never spoken to him to straightforward before. They weren’t treating him like a kid, not once. Part of his head wondered if maybe he shouldn’t feel like it was wrong, almost, for his parents to talk to him like he was their equal, telling him things that parents usually didn’t tell their kids, but the truth was, he liked the honesty. Because it felt like, for once, they were talking about the things that mattered.  
  
They talked about the uncle Fred had been named for, and how broken and hurting his mum and dad had been when he’d died, and how broken and hurting they still were. They talked about the angry months, and how, when they yelled about dishes and laundry and dinnertime, they weren’t really yelling about those things. They talked about how his mum and dad felt that they had to yell about things that could be fixed because if they started yelling about the things that were _really_ wrong, the things that _couldn’t_ be fixed, it would all be too much.  
  
They talked a _lot_ that afternoon, about things that they never had before, and Fred got to say the things to his parents that he’d been too afraid to say before, and at the end of the afternoon, Fred knew something _Huge_ had just happened to him, but he couldn’t really think about it, not yet.  
  
“We’re going to do our best to do better,” his mum promised when it seemed like everything had been said. “But it isn’t going to happen all at once, Freddie. You’re gonna have to be patient with us, and you’re gonna have to start speaking up. We will do better by you and Roxie, but if we start slipping, you have to tell us.”  
  
“But what if you won’t listen?” Fred asked then. “What if I try, and you don’t hear me?”  
  
“Then . . .” his dad said, thinking. “We need a word. Something you can say into a fight that means we have to stop and listen.”  
  
“Like . . . pause?” Fred suggested. “When we watch Muggle films on Aunt Audrey’s VCR and James or Molly or I want to say something, we hit the pause button.” Aunt Audrey’s Muggle contraptions had long been a source of fascination for all the cousins.  
  
Fred’s dad grinned and nodded. “Okay. Yeah. Pause. You say pause, we have to stop and listen to what you have to say. Deal?”  
  
Fred nodded. “Deal,” he said, and the three of them shook on it.  
  
“Now you better go,” his mum said, and Fred looked at her, confused.  
  
“Go where?” he asked, and she shared a smile with his dad.  
  
“Why, to your camp out, of course,” his dad said, ruffling Fred’s hair. “James and Molly are waiting.”  
                  
Fred’s face lit up. “You mean it?” he asked, looking back and forth between the pair of them. They shared a long look.  
  
“We mean it,” his mum said. “Go on.”  
  
Fred hugged both of them once, hard and tight, then ran out the door and bounded down the stairs. He didn’t know if he was ready to tell James and Molly everything that had just happened, but he knew some of it would have to come out.  
  
The Angry Months got better after that. When the next Christmas rolled around, Fred watched anxiously, waiting to see what would happen, whether or not his parents would keep their promise, or if they would slip back into the old angry ways. And he could tell they were trying, and they lasted a lot longer. And the first time they started to yell, even just a little bit, Fred was there in the doorway, saying “Pause!” as loud as he could, and he watched his parents freeze and take deep breaths and calm down. And he felt the anxious knot that had been part of him so long start to loosen and fall away.  
  
His family would always be unorthodox. And the Angry Months would never fully go away. But they did begin to get better, and that, Fred knew, was a lot.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have written in the past about the brokenness that is George and Angelina. The story is called A Hole in the World, and I will be posting it here eventually. Basically, that story was written (for Maggie), and it was about just how messed up the relationship between George and Angelina would always be on some level. In my headcanon, theirs was a "just for sex" relationship, and then Fred happened. And I wanted to explore what it would be like being a kid growing up in the midst of that brokenness, with these two people for parents who are trying so hard but are so very broken and so very in pain.
> 
> This is that Fred. I wanted, like James, to get him away from the pure troublemaker that he seems to be portrayed as so often. Here, yes, he gets into trouble and he causes mischief, but there's more than that. My Fred is a very mature kid, all things considered, and a fantastic big brother to Roxie (which we will see more of in her chapter), but no kid can be that mature and deal with things on that level all the time, so the mischief breaks out. 
> 
> I have a lot to say about this kid, hence the much longer than usual chapter. Kudos to you for getting through it.


	7. Scorpius Malfoy

_Scorpius_

It never struck Scorpius Malfoy as odd that he didn't know exactly what his father did for a living. On the very rare occasion that anyone asked, he simply said what he had grown up hearing - that his father was a Ministry Consultant, and if he didn't know precisely what that meant, well, neither did anyone else. The title was vague enough to be all-encompassing but important-sounding enough that no one felt comfortable asking more questions. Which was exactly why it had been chosen.

There was also the added benefit that the title could describe what the Malfoy family had been doing for generations - donating enough [money](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8985993/7/) to the Ministry to be able to whisper in the ears of higher ups on issues near and dear to the Malfoy name and fortune - so most people just sneered with some contempt at the idea that Draco Malfoy was still trying to keep his fingers in the pie, and looked no further. Which was, again, by design.

Scorpius Malfoy didn't know any of this.

To Scorpius, Draco Malfoy was only ever his father - distant and aloof, but since Scorpius wasn't around other children enough to have a basis for comparison, he barely gave a second thought as to what his father was or wasn't. The frequency with which his father was gone didn't help matters.

For as long as Scorpius could remember, his father was gone for five to seven days of every month, away on "business trips," his mother always said. She also told him that before he was born, his father's trips had lasted much longer. Sometimes, she had told him, his father had been gone for months at a time.

"Did you miss him?" young Scorpius had asked.

"Very much," his mother had said. "I always miss him when he's gone. Do you?"

"Yes," young Scorpius had replied, but more because he knew it was the expected answer than because it was necessarily true. He supposed he missed his father. He'd never really thought about it. Life in his home was much the same for Scorpius whether his father was there or not. Draco Malfoy was a distant father, but not a particularly stern or strict one. He did not insist on absolute quiet in the house, nor did he expect Scorpius to behave like a miniature adult. He encouraged Scorpius to run and play and laugh and sing (as much as Scorpius was inclined to those things). He accepted hugs or tokens of affection when offered. He would smile indulgently when Scorpius had a story to tell him. He rarely instigated the affection, and he never joined in anything that could be considered play, but he never wished for his son to eschew such things. And he never pushed Scorpius away, though he did tend to hold him at arms' length, the result being that when Draco Malfoy was present, Scorpius fit him into his day to day life without thinking about it, and when he wasn't, Scorpius's world shrank once more to him and his mother.

Scorpius's mother was a social activist. She had a weekly column in the Daily Prophet that allowed her to work mostly from home, and Scorpius adored her. She laughed and played and was silly right along with him, and every once in a very rare while, she could convince his father to come out in the garden and sit on the grass with them and perhaps make a few colored bubbles with his wand for Scorpius to play with, or conjure a Patronus for Scorpius to chase. Those moments were rare, and though Scorpius didn't, as a child, understand exactly what they meant, he knew they were important, and he treasured them.

When Scorpius sat quietly and concentrated very hard, he was almost certain he could remember being tossed up in the air by his father, who was smiling and laughing and swinging him around the summer garden, and he also thought he could remember riding his father like a pony, but the older Scorpius got, the less those memories meshed with the father he knew, and the more likely he thought it that they were just things he'd dreamed.

Scorpius led a very solitary childhood. There was Mum, who was always there, and Hilde, their [housekeeper](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8985993/7/), who spoiled Scorpius rotten but still lectured him time and again on how to be a polite, lovely boy. And there was Father. Every once in a while, there was Aunt Daphne and Uncle Theo, whom Scorpius liked well enough, and their daughter, his cousin Enid, but she was several years younger than Scorpius and therefore not much of a companion. There were also grandparents, but Scorpius always felt stiff and uncomfortable around both sets, and he and Mum and Father didn't visit either household very often. Grandmother Narcissa was better than the others, but Grandfather Lucius and Grandmother Helena were both quite unpleasant, and Scorpius always felt like they were finding fault with him.

There were very few other children. By the time Scorpius was old enough to understand that this was unusual, he knew enough to know that things were that way because of his father and his name, though he didn't understand why or how.

He remembered being six years old and in London with his Mum. It was near Christmas, and she was frantic and flustered because she had a charity event that night to prepare and she was supposed to have left Scorpius at home, but Hilde was sick and his father had been called away suddenly and Aunt Daphne had just had Enid, so he'd had to tag along with her on her errands. And in one of the shops, Mum was picking up something expensive, and the shopkeeper had asked her to go into the back room where it was being stored, and there had been no kids allowed.

"Scorpius," Mum had said, kneeling down to his level, "I need you to stay right here, for just two minutes, okay? Don't move, don't touch anything, don't talk to anyone, understand?"

And Scorpius had nodded and said, "Yes, Mum," and she'd drawn a shining circle around him with her wand and looked very nervous as she'd gone to the next room, though Scorpius hadn't understood why.

But not long after his mother had disappeared from sight, a lady he didn't know had come up beside him with a sneer on her face. Not able to cross the line his mother had drawn, she had just looked down at him and asked, "Are you proud of your father, little boy?" And Scorpius had stared up at her, not answering because his mother had told him not to talk to anyone, and because he wasn't sure the woman was talking to him at all, as her question hadn't made any sense. "Did you hear me?" she'd said, and she'd sounded so angry. "Are you proud to have such a sniveling coward for a father?"

"D'you know my father?" Scorpius had asked, because if she knew his father, maybe it was all right to talk to her, and if she didn't, then he could politely inform her that she probably had him mixed up with someone else.

"The whole world knows your father, or hasn't he had the guts to tell you? You're the child of a coward, a coward and a traitor, and if your family had any decency—"

And then a large, solid shape had swept between them, and Scorpius's mother had been there, her jaw high and set in a hard line, and Scorpius had hardly recognized her, this woman whose eyes were blazing instead of twinkling. She'd scared him a bit, much more than the loud, rude woman had.

"I will thank you not to speak so to my son," his mother had said in a hard voice.

"You think you're so fine, so high and mighty," the woman had sneered at Scorpius's mother. "But the whole world knows the truth of you, and you won't ever escape it, not as long as you live."

"And shall we open the book of your life and find the missteps you have made?" his mother had challenged. "Shall we write them down on weights and hang them about your neck to be borne the rest of your days? Shall we see if you are equal to it when heaviness of your misdeeds is draped upon your shoulders?"

"I hope you're enjoying the lonely life you've chosen for yourself, Astoria Greengrass," the woman had spat, but Scorpius's mother had been unfazed.

"My name," she had said in a clear voice, "is Astoria Malfoy, and it is a name that I bear proudly. And yes, thank you, I am happy in the life I chose. Would that you could say the same. But judging from your need to attack _children_ with your foul words, it is clear that you cannot. And I have no further time to waste on ignorant people. Come along, Scorpius."

And she had taken his hand and led him gently from the shop while the woman had shouted more nasty things after them.

Scorpius had had a lot of questions at the end of that day, and Astoria had let him ask them, and she had answered them, explaining the situation as well as it could be explained to a six-year-old. It wasn't until some years later that Scorpius really understood what she had said that night, but he understood from that day on that there would always be people who looked at him differently because of who his father was and the mysterious bad things he had done so many years ago.

And that was why, Scorpius figured out, there were no other children. None but Honoria.

Scorpius had known Honoria Ridgeton pretty much his whole life. She was just a few months younger than he was, and someday, he was going to marry her.

This wasn't puppy love or any sort of little-boy-certainty declaration; it wasn't even something that Scorpius had decided. Their marriage had been arranged for them by their parents when they were two years old.

That he would probably marry Honoria was something that Scorpius _knew_ , but it wasn't something he thought a lot about, at least, not until he was almost eleven. Because when he turned eleven, there was going to be a ceremony where he and Honoria swore to each other that they would one day maybe get married. The whole thing was strange to him because his parents had been careful to tell him that he didn't _have_ to marry Honoria, they would make that choice when they were older, but that this was just a ceremony. And yet, for all that they told him that, the ceremony seemed a lot more important to his parents than they made out.

He knew that because seven weeks before his eleventh birthday, he overheard a late night conversation between his parents. He was getting a drink of water from the bathroom, and they were in the sitting room below, and their voices carried, and he heard his name, and then he did what any good ten-year-old would. He positioned himself against the stairway wall and crept halfway down the steps so he could listen better.

"I thought he promised you no more big trips, not until May. Not until after Scorpius's birthday," his mother said in a tight, hushed voice.

"You know as well as I do that those promises are never firm, Astoria," his father said quietly. "Much as the world might think otherwise, there are some things Harry Potter cannot control, and when Dark wizards choose to resurface is one of them. He needs me now, not seven weeks from now."

"You know how important this birthday is, Draco."

"And you know how important catching scum like Avery is. The man has evaded me for almost seventeen years; I'm not letting him get away again." Scorpius had never heard his father speak with such a tone before, and it frightened him.

"Draco, you're talking like this is personal—"

"It _is_ personal," his father interrupted forcefully. "He was my house-mate, Astoria, he sat next to me time and again, he murdered our classmates during the battle and took _glee_ in it, it _is_ personal."

"Draco—"

"What would you have me do? No one knows Avery like I do. No one else has a better chance of capturing him once and for all. Do you want me to go to Potter and tell him that I can't assist in the capture of one of the last at large members of the Old War threat because my son's birthday is in two months?"

His mother was silent after that question, and Scorpius found himself chewing on his lip as he waited anxiously to hear what would be said next. It was his father who spoke again.

"It will not take me long," he said in a gentler voice. "Four weeks at the most. I will be back before his birthday."

"And if you're not?" she challenged then. "What am I to tell Ridgetons? If this takes longer than you plan? You're his _father_ , you're to stand behind him at the ceremony, to show your support, to acknowledge that he is equal to the responsibility."

"You need not inform me how important my presence at the ceremony is," was all Scorpius's father said. "I will be there. I will be back before March is out." Scorpius heard the sound of kissing, then his father said, "I love you, Astoria."

"And I, you," his mother responded, though she sounded sad. There was the sound of another kiss, and Scorpius crept back up the stairs, not wanting to be caught listening. The next morning, his father was gone. His mother told him it would be a longer trip than usual. "But he'll be back by the end of March," she'd said with a smile.

But he wasn't. March ended and April began, and there was no sign or word of his father. As Scorpius's birthday came steadily nearer, Scorpius watched his mother become more and more anxious and worried. She wrote more letters, Flooed more people, and made more trips to London in her best clothes than Scorpius could ever remember.

He also caught her crying in her room late at night two different times, but he didn't like to think about that, as the memory made him feel sick to his stomach.

He worried because he knew his mother was worried. But he was only vaguely aware that there was something about the gravity of the situation that was outside his understanding.

Three nights before his birthday, he sat on the steps outside the sitting room long after he was supposed to be asleep, and eavesdropped on his mother making two Floo calls. The first was to the Ridgetons.

"Hello," she said in a cheery voice that Scorpius was almost sure was fake. "Sorry to bother you so late at night, but I wanted to let you know that Draco has come down with a sudden and pretty serious case of Dragon Pox." Mr. Ridgeton said something then that Scorpius couldn't hear, but sounded sympathetic. "Yes, I know," his mother responded. "Merlin only knows where he picked it up. It's just gotten worse as the day's gone on, and we're hoping he'll be all right by the 21st, but . . ."

Scorpius strained to hear Mr. Ridgeton's response, creeping further down the stairs. He caught the end of the sentence. " . . . really, it's no problem, Astoria. You let us know if we need to postpone, and tell Draco to feel better."

His mother's next call was to Mrs. Granger-Weasley, and that was the one that made Scorpius's stomach tie in knots. They spoke in hushed, anxious whispers, and Scorpius could only hear a few, broken phrases that made no sense: "fully immerse" . . . "made his cover" . . . "agent gone dark."

With a growl of frustration, Scorpius tiptoed quietly but quickly up the stairs and scurried for the second floor parlor. It shared a heating grate with the sitting room, and lying on his stomach behind the settee, his ear against the grate, he could hear much clearer.

". . . don't know if he doesn't know more or just can't tell me more. He did say Harry planned on sending in a second agent if they haven't heard anything by the end of the week. But if Draco _has_ gone dark, it's for a reason, and sending a second agent might just make things worse. It's a gamble either way. I'm sorry I can't be more help."

Scorpius retreated to his bedroom after that because if he stayed much longer or heard much more it would become too hard to keep pretending that his dad had an ordinary job and went on ordinary business trips and that this was somehow an ordinary delay.

Two nights later, the night before his birthday, Scorpius woke to the faint _crack_ of Apparition coming from somewhere outside. In a flash, he was out of bed and down to the back second floor landing, which had the window with the best view of their Apparition point. He could see a cloaked figure moving heavily toward the house. Even as he watched, his mother, who had heard the _crack_ as well, flung open the front door and ran to the figure.

Scorpius took advantage of his mother's absence to run to the second floor parlor and position himself with his ear to the grate. Moments later, his parents entered the sitting room. Scorpius's father looked gaunt and exhausted, and Mother had to help him to the fainting couch by the fire. Scorpius's father sagged into the velvet with nothing like his usual uprightness.

"Where have you been?" his mother asked in a whisper little more than a hiss. Draco Malfoy gave a wan smile.

"I told you I'd be back for Scorpius's birthday."

"You said you'd be back in four weeks; it's been seven and a half!" Scorpius had never heard his mother sound so angry.

"I told you I would be gone as long as it took," his father said calmly, and Scorpius watched his mother turn away sharply. "The added length was unfortunate but unavoidable. I feared my cover had been made. I had to go to ground. I couldn't risk making contact; I didn't know who was watching or what they'd seen."

"I don't care," his mother said viciously. "I don't care about Avery, I don't care about your mission, and I don't care about your cover. Your son's birthday is _tomorrow—_ "

"And I'm home. You cannot be angry with me for something that didn't happen."

"And you can't claim credit for luck and coincidence!" his mother shot back. "Which are the only responsible factors for your return in the nick of time! I _lied_ to the Ridgetons, Draco! That's what you've made me!"

It made Scorpius feel very small and frightened to hear his parents arguing in such a way. But his father didn't seem cowed or upset at all; rather, he got stiffly but solidly to his feet and approached his wife, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder. She shrugged sharply away from it.

"Come now," he said in a soft voice, so soft Scorpius almost couldn't catch it. "Let's have this out, Astoria. This isn't about the birthday. Say what you wish to say."

For a moment, Scorpius thought his mother would refuse. But then, her face crumpled. "I was scared to _death_ ," she said in a whisper. "What if I'd lost you?" Scorpius's father took her into his arms then, holding her tight, and Scorpius felt the knot in his stomach loosen a bit.

His father murmured something that Scorpius couldn't hear, but when his mother replied, "He's in bed, asleep," he figured he ought to get back to bed, and fast.

He got the door shut just before he heard his father start to make his way up the stairs, moving slower than usual. Scorpius made sure his back was to the door and his eyes were shut tight. Moments later, a sliver of light spilled into the room as the door was opened just the tiniest bit. Scorpius couldn't see his father, or hear him, but he knew he was there. He wondered, for a moment, if his father would come in to wake him, to let him know that he was home in time for his birthday.

But instead his father just stood in the doorway for several long moments, then shut the door carefully behind him. And the next morning, when Scorpius came down for breakfast, his father was at the table, reading the paper as if he'd never been away. He wished his son a happy birthday, and Scorpius said "Thank you, Father," in his most respectful voice. No remark was made on his father's extended absence, and life returned to normal in the Malfoy household, as if it had never happened.

Except that Scorpius knew it had. He didn't know what it meant, and he didn't understand why it was important, and he wouldn't for many years to come. But the events surrounding the weeks before his eleventh birthday opened his eyes to the fact that his father was a lot more than Scorpius had ever been told, a complicated puzzle that Scorpius would spend the next ten years trying to solve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As is well established in my Pieces Universe stories (if you know where to look), my Draco Malfoy is a spy. After helping to clear his name, Harry kinda guilted him into becoming an undercover agent for the Auror Department. His code name is White Ferret (courtesy of Ron), only a handful of people are aware of the work that he does. The rest of the world sees him as a coward for his part in the war. This is the Draco and Astoria from "And the World Turns 'Round," and it is the Scorpius from the Roses Trilogy, hence the mention of Honoria and the Bonding.
> 
> I'm a bit sorry that Scorpius's moment turned out to focus so heavily on Draco, but only a bit, as a) Scorpius has an entire trilogy and upwards of 85,000 words devoted to him and his life at school and after and his romantic entanglements; b) I find Draco to be fascinating; and c) Draco is, in this universe, Scorpius's defining factor. Wanting to make his father proud of him defines Scorpius his entire time at Hogwarts. He goes into the Auror program because of how the world has responded to his father his whole life.
> 
> In painting this relationship, then, I really wanted to drive home the fact that Draco was not a bad father. He was just a distance and detached one. But he wasn't one of these horribly strict, Captain-Von-Trapp-pre-fun-loving-governess type of fathers. He wanted his son to be a child, and he loves Scorpius very much. Too much, from his perspective. I think if Draco had been a stricter father, then Scorpius's relationship with him would have been much more straightforward. But because Draco is this mysterious sort of figure, it becomes much more complicated, and Scorpius does spend the next ten years trying to figure it out.


	8. Rose Weasley

_Rose_

Rose Weasley adored her father. As far as she was concerned, he was the reason the stars hung in the sky and the sun came up each morning. There was nothing he couldn't do and nothing he didn't know. Merlin sounded pretty cool, and Albus Dumbledore was worth hearing stories about, but to Rosie, her father was the real hero, and the best one anyone could ever ask for.

He told the best bedtime stories, too. Every night, since before she could remember, he told her and her brother tales of the adventures of the two greatest storybook characters ever, Prince Billy and Princess Jean. As far as she could tell, her brilliant father made these stories up out of his own head, because no one else had ever heard them.

Which meant the world was missing out. Prince Billy and Princess Jean were miles better than Marvin the Mad Muggle or Babbitty Rabbitty. Billy, Jean, and every once in a while, their friend Sir Harold, had done _everything_ — saved a castle from a monster with two heads; defeated a monstrous snake with the power to turn people to stone; overthrown an evil, magical toad who had enslaved a kingdom; befriended werewolves and [giants](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8985993/8/) and thestrals; battled Acromantulas and Dementors and the fearsome Skrewt; and the three of them together had led an army to bring down the treacherous Lord Riddle, the darkest wizard of all time.

Rosie was eight when she started to figure out that Billy and Jean were actually her mother and father, and recurring characters like Lady Knight Jennifer, Master Jester Forge, and Stuffy Lord Percival, to name just a few, were her aunts and uncles and parents' friends.

Knowing her father had fought these battles and slain these monsters just made him rise in her esteem. Her dad had done so many incredible things, saved the world so many times! And when she was eight and she told him she'd figured it out, he'd promised to tel her the real stories someday.

Rosie was almost ten when she decided that day should come sooner rather than later.

She knew her father liked to spend a few hours each night working in his [study](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8985993/8/), that he shut himself in there about an hour past her bedtime. So one night, after a tale of 'The Time Prince Billy Saved Princess Jean from the Clutches of the Tyrannical Duke Crummy' – a story that always made her mum roll her eyes, for some reason, and counter with the tale of 'The Time Princess Jean Had to Protect Prince Billy from the Suffocatingly-Irritating-But-Not-Terribly-Dangerou s Princess Purple' – she slipped out of bed and into her father's empty study to wait for him.

Rosie's favorite chair in the whole house was in her dad's study. It was burnt orange and threadbare and her mother hated it, but it was so [soft](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8985993/8/) and comfortable! And Rosie hardly ever got to sit in it, so she took advantage of the chance now and curled up to wait.

She'd almost fallen asleep when her father finally slipped in, and he didn't even see her until he'd sat down at his desk. He froze, and then one eyebrow rose.

"Does your mother know you're down here?" he asked. She sat up and clumsily tried to raise one eyebrow back at him.

"If Mum knew, do you think I'd still be down here?" she asked, and her father laughed.

"No, I suppose not," he said.

"Are you gonna make me go back to bed?"

"Well," her father said, sitting back in his chair and considering. "I think I'll decide that once you tell me why you're staking out my study."

Suddenly shy, Rosie looked down and focused on her hands, chewing at the inside of her lip. "You said you'd tell me the real stories someday?" She glanced up at him quickly, and was startled to see him looking at her really closely, like he was trying to figure out something about her.

"Okay," he said finally. "I think you're old enough." And he turned his chair to face hers and sat forward so his arms were resting on his knees. "Where do you want to start?"

She hadn't really thought this out beyond asking the initial question. For a moment, she was at a loss, but then the firelight caught the strange faint scars that wound around his wrists and arms. Before she'd figured out the secret of Prince Billy, she'd never given them a second thought. But seeing them now, knowing some little bit of the truth, she thought and thought but couldn't find a Prince Billy story where Prince Billy got hurt like that.

"Where did your scars come from?"

The only sign that her father was surprised by the question was in the way his eyebrows rose. He raised his hands slightly and turned them toward her. "You mean these?" he asked. She nodded. He considered the scars as if he hadn't thought about them in a long time. "That's . . . a big first question, Rosie. These . . . well, you know Uncle Harry's Pensive?" Rosie's eyes widened.

"Uncle Harry's Pensive did _that_?" she asked, shocked. "But it's just tucked away on a shelf! It could fall on anyone! Do you think he knows?"

Her dad laughed. "No, sweetie. I mean, you know because of the Pensive that thoughts can be real, physical things?"

"Oh," she said, sinking back into her chair, feeling much less panicked. "Yes. I know that."

"Well, I . . . got on the wrong side of some very powerful thoughts. Concentrated all at once, not like the single thoughts that get diluted in a Pensive. That's where they latched on."

"How old were you?"

"Sixteen."

"And which Prince Billy adventure was it?"

Her father smiled. "Oh, let's see. That would have been Successfully Navigate The Puzzle Rooms, which were part of the Evil, Magical Toad enslaving the kingdom, and overlapped with both Save the Grim Prisoner and Save Sir Harold from Possession at the Hands of Lord Riddle."

Rosie was silent for a long time, digesting this. Then, she said, "This is gonna take a while, isn't it?" For the third time that night, Rosie's comment made her dad laugh.

"Yeah," he said. "So how about this? You go on up to bed before your mother finds out you're down here, and I promise that the next time you make your way down here, I'll start at the beginning, hmm?"

"Okay," she said reluctantly, dragging herself out of the chair. Her dad smiled and kissed her head.

"Night, Princess," he said.

"Night, Daddy," she said, kissing his cheek.

Rosie became a frequent fixture in her father's study after that, and night by night, story by story, Rosie learned the truth behind the tales, the good and the slightly ugly. It didn't happen in weeks, or even months, and there were some sides of stories that took years to come out, but everything she learned, even the ugly parts, only made her dad more of a hero in her eyes. And every story made her more determined to become the kind of girl worthy of being his daughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Pieces Rose shares two canons: Rose from the Roses Trilogy and Rosie from Bedtime Stories. She gave me a little trouble because I've already written so much about her, but in the end, I decided I wanted to focus on what mentality from her childhood kind of drives her in the Roses trilogy. Her father is such a hero in her eyes, and she wants so badly to live up to the kind of character he was in these childhood stories, and she was so in awe of and filled with love for him, and that determination to be worth something in his eyes, that she managed to miss what was beyond obvious to everyone else.
> 
> I really enjoy writing Daddy!Ron, too, so that was fun to explore a little further here. I honestly think Ron would be the best kind of dad. He's not perfect, but he tries so hard and loves his child so much. I hope I captured that.


	9. Al Potter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Al Potter

_Al_

Some months into his second year, the half-brewed Forgetfulness Potion of one of Al Potter's classmates went terribly, terribly wrong. Half the class was doused in the shower, and because the potion was incomplete, it affected each student differently. Evelyn Mayhew turned purple. Frank Johnson started babbling in what sounded like Ancient Greek. Al himself grew a handsome pair of antlers.

There were too many casualties for Professor Pritchard to handle himself, so he sent the students who could still walk under their own power – and still remembered the way – to the Hospital Wing for Madame Pomfrey to treat. Al spent the entire trek mentally reviewing every detail of the incident that he could remember, because in situations like this, he reasoned, you never knew what was going to be important, and Madame Pomfrey was going to need all the help she could get.

In his childlike naivete, Al mistakenly believed that the school nurse had never seen an incident like this before, that she didn't treat at least a dozen Potions mishaps every term. To a worry-prone twelve-year-old, this was a medical catastrophe that would take nothing short of magical genius to rectify. To Madame Pomfrey, it was a Tuesday.

She listened patiently to his rapid recitation for about half a minute, swiftly adding ingredients to a series of cauldrons along the back wall, then cut him off with a, "Thank you, Mr. Potter. That's all I need to know."

And she distributed portions of potions to Al and his classmates, and Al watched in wide-mouthed amazement as the side effects melted off his peers almost immediately. Oh, there were a handful who took more specific care, but the majority of the second years were treated, returned to normal, and dismissed back to class in less than five minutes. Al watched them go, still staring in shock and awe, his potion glass halfway to his mouth.

"Mr. Potter," Madame Pomfrey said sharply after a moment. "Do you plan on keeping those antlers as a fashion statement?"

Belatedly, Al drank his potion, and in the next moment or two, he felt the antlers shrink back into his forehead. He lifted his hands to his head in amazement, and then he was at Madame Pomfrey's side, demanding, "How did you do that?" as she frowned in concentration at the place where Al's classmate Gertie had once had a mouth.

"Hmm, topical or airborne?" he heard her mutter, turning Gertie's head this way and that, which was not an answer to his question.

"Madame Pomfrey!" he said more insistently. "Didn't you hear me?"

"Mr. Potter," she said, eyes flicking briefly and impatiently in his direction, "if you are not still ailing, you are free to return to your classroom. Topical, I think," she said, referencing Gertie, and she crossed to her store cupboard for a jar of ointment. Al followed her, immediately behind her when she turned, which succeeded in obtaining her attention, but not in assuaging her building irritation.

"How did you fix everyone?" he demanded.

"I haven't, Mr. Potter," was her pointed response, "because _someone_ is standing in my way and preventing me from treating my patients."

Al moved aside, but he didn't leave. He watched Madame Pomfrey treat Gertie and Reynard and Emmaline and all his other classmates and send them on their way, and then he approached her again.

"How did you do that?"he asked her for a third time.

"Mr. Potter, I have been the nurse at Hogwarts since before your grandparents were a twinkle in your great-grandparents' eyes; I am well up to counteracting a second year potion gone wrong. Now, as you are neither injured nor ailing, you have no need to be here, and I'm certain you have a class to get back to."

Al left, but he was back the next day, and the next, and the day after that. Every moment he had free was spent in the infirmary, watching, observing, and peppering Madame Pomfrey with questions about cures and fixes and spell reversals. He never got much more than a reprimand or instruction to get himself off to class, but with unswerving stubbornness inherited from his mother, Al refused to back down or give up.

"What is it, Mr. Potter, that you are hoping will happen?" Madame Pomfrey demanded one day when he'd entered more quietly than usual and caught her by surprise. "Do you think that, by being constantly underfoot, you will eventually wear me down so I will appease your requests simply to get you out of the way?"

The question was sarcastic and rhetorical, but Al answered it anyway. "That's Plan B," he said, serious and genuine. Her eyes narrowed and her arms crossed as she considered him.

"All right," she said finally. "Enlighten me. What is Plan A?"

"That you'll realize I'm serious." He was as emphatic and firm as it was possible for a twelve-year-old to be. "I want to learn from you; I want to be a Healer!"

"You are twelve years old." She stated the fact simply, no derision, no judgement. Just a fact. "How do you know what you want?"

Al turned the question back on her. "I'm twelve years old. Why shouldn't I?" For a fraction of a moment, he thought he might have actually surprised her. So he kept talking. "You fix people, Madame Pomfrey. That's all I've ever wanted to do. You know everything there is to know about Healing, and I will learn anything you have to teach me, even if all I ever do is sit in the corner and take notes. You're the best there is! Just, please let me show you that I mean it!"

She was silent for a long time, and Al thought that maybe, just _maybe_ he had gotten through to her. _Maybe_ he had convinced her. Then, "You have class, Mr. Potter. You'd best be on your way to it."

Al tried not to visibly deflate, but it was difficult. Without another word, he turned and left the infirmary, defeat informing every feature.

He almost didn't return the next day, because if that speech hadn't swayed her, what would? But no, he thought, stubbornly setting his chin. He had a point to make. He had something to prove. So, at the hour and a half break between morning and afternoon classes, he scarfed down lunch and headed for the Hospital Wing. And that day, something was different.

Madame Pomfrey was waiting for him.

"In the back water closet," she said without preamble or introduction, "are bedpans that are long overdue for a scouring. I haven't had any detention students assigned to the infirmary lately. I'm not inclined to trust a second year's Scouring Spell, so you will have to do it by hand. I will show you the proper procedure once and only once, so you'd best pay close attention."

"Madame Pomfrey," Al said, breathless, "Are you . . . are you saying what I think you're saying?" She peered at him over her spectacles.

"I am saying that if you are going to persist in coming here regardless of any word or action of mine, I might as well get something out of it," she said in a pointed tone. "Are you going to stand gaping at me, or are you going to come to the back water closet?"

For the next month, Al Potter spent his spare moments occupied at menial tasks in the infirmary. He scoured bedpans, laundered bedding, and scrubbed the Hospital Wing to within an inch of its life, and eventually graduated to alphabetizing the store cupboard of healing herbs and filing away incident cards. He was thorough and diligent, and never once did he sigh or groan or express boredom or displeasure with the work he was being asked to do.

And so, the day came when Madame Pomfrey stopped him on his way to the store cupboard that housed the brooms and mops.

"One moment, please, Mr. Potter. I need to speak with you in my office."

Heart pounding, he followed her into the small but sunny office and perched nervously on the edge of the wooden chair reserved for visitors.

That was the day Al Potter's life changed forever, because that was the day Madame Pomfrey officially took him on as her apprentice. His willingness to do any task asked of him, no matter how menial or repetitive, and the frankly astounding fact that he hadn't viewed the month's labor as a test but rather a series of reasonable requests, had convinced her.

By the time his second year ended, he was spending three evenings a week in the Hospital Wing, and most every Saturday. By the time his third year started, he was assisting in the brewing of potions and treating the most minor of complaints. By the start of his fourth year, he was nearly as constant a fixture in the infirmary as Madame Pomfrey herself.

And there came a time when students who arrived at the Hospital Wing with bumps and scrapes and bruises, or who needed Pepper-Up Potion or a headache cure, could expect to be treated by Al Potter, Madame Pomfrey doing little more than glancing in their direction and noting the incident in her records. Under a closer watch, Al was even setting bones and reversing spell damage and weighing in on treatments. There was nothing he wasn't willing to do and nothing he didn't want to learn.

When he wasn't treating student patients or brewing potions or putting things in order or cleaning and scrubbing, Al was sitting in a corner with a notepad, observing Madame Pomfrey at work. He watched her treat spell damage and Quidditch injuries, headaches and colds and acne. He watched her calm students down from their stress and reassure them that their cough was not pneumonia and fix the everyday problems of hundreds of teenagers to get them ready to face the next day. And he watched her quill tremble ever so slightly, squint three or four times at the next ingredient on a potions list before she could read it, strain under a load that had once been no trouble. And he made up his mind to help her just like she helped everyone else.

He was on his way to the Hospital Wing one day late in his fifth year when he heard it – a boom and a crash that stopped him cold for just a moment before he sprinted full-out for the infirmary doors – and saw Madame Pomfrey crumpled on the floor, remains of what had been an almost-brewed batch of Pepper-Up Potion splattered all over the back wall.

He was at her side before he'd even finished deciding to go there, checking breathing and pulse and resisting the urge to shout her name when he knew it wouldn't help.

As soon as he knew she was still alive, he pulled out his wand and Conjured up his fox Patronus. "Send for Mungo's," he spoke aloud, fusing the words to the fox and focusing on his godfather. "Madame Pomfrey needs help."

Then he Summoned dittany and aloe and knelt to do the little he could to stem the flow of blood and treat the burns.

Moments later, Neville Longbottom burst through the door, Headmistress Sinastra close on his heels. Not stopping his ministrations, Al informed them in a voice far calmer than he felt of what he knew had happened and what he was trying to do. Neville, whose knowledge of healing came from the battlefield, knelt to help while the Headmistress quickly set up a barrier around the door and went to wait for the Healer.

"I sent for Healer Bones," his godfather told him, "a friend, through personal channels," which Al knew to mean the old enchanted coins of Dumbledore's Army. The name Bones was familiar, as well. He thought he'd met her at some event or another, or possibly studied her in a history class. "She'll get here faster than anyone through the official ones."

"Thank you," Al said, but his voice sounded dull and hollow to his ears.

When Healer Susan Bones came striding into the infirmary, Al repeated the information he'd offered Neville and the Headmistress, and he insisted on being allowed to help move Madame Pomfrey up onto a waiting bed.

Under normal circumstances, he would have then insisted to be allowed to stay and observe, but these weren't normal circumstances. Feeling slightly ill, he allowed his godfather to lead him to the hall and sit.

"She's lucky you were there," Neville said, trying to relieve his worries, but the words had the opposite effect.

"I _told_ her I would do it!" Al shouted, angry now, angry and frantic with worry, and up on his feet.

"Al," his godfather said gently, but Al spoke over him.

"No, I _told_ her I would take care of it! I told her to let me do it, she _knows_ how volatile Pepper-Up is, she _knows_ her hands aren't — she should have waited for me!"

Behind him, Neville had gone very still, and Al realized, belated, what he had unintentionally revealed.

"Al," his godfather said, and Al rounded on him, fierce and defensive.

"She's _fine_ ," he hissed. "She's _fine_ , she's – her hands shake sometimes, and she doesn't see as well as she used to, that's _all_ , and — she's still the best damn Healer you or I have ever—"

"I never said she wasn't," Neville said, cutting through Al's tirade. Exhausted now, his anger flared and gone, Al sank back down onto the bench, head in his hands.

"She should have waited," he whispered, his voice soft with anguish and guilt and worry. "She should have — I was _on_ my _way_."

Neville wisely said nothing, just sat with a comforting hand on his godson's back while they waited for news.

Healer Bones appeared not long later. Al rose to his feet immediately with a, "How is she? It looked to me like she got her arm up in time to protect her eyes from the spray, but there will probably be lingering irritation. Did she inhale the smoke? Is there respiratory damage? Is she conscious? Can I —"

"Al," Neville interrupted, a heavy hand on his shoulder. "You'll get your questions answered faster if you let her talk."

Knowing he was right, Al forced himself to take a deep breath. "Don't sugar coat it," was all the more he said. "Tell me straight."

Healer Bones smiled at him. "She'll be fine," she said gently. "I've treated the burns on her arms and face, there was no damage done to her eyes. The blast knocked her to the ground and she hit her head. The fumes irritated her eyes and throat, but nothing a few days' rest won't fix right up. It's actually not an uncommon occurrence, exploding Pepper-Up. We see it at Mungo's a lot, sometimes from our own people. It's easy to do; only takes a tiny bit too much Horklump juice in the final brewing stage. She should make a full recovery after a week or two, Al."

Swallowing, he nodded, taking in the information, trying not to go weak with relief. "Can I talk to her?"

"Al," Neville said, "maybe you should —"

"No, it's all right," Healer Bones said with a smile. "She's asked for him, actually."

Al was through the doors before she'd finished speaking.

Madame Pomfrey was sitting up in the farthest bed from the door. Her hands and arms were bandaged, her eyes and face redder than usual, but not looking nearly as bad as Al had feared. He stood at the foot of her bed, arms crossed, staring down at her as she looked impassively up at him. "What happened?" he demanded.

"My hand slipped."

"Slipped?" he repeated, vaguely accusatory. "Or shook?"

She didn't answer.

Shaking his head, Al pulled a nearby stool to the side of the bed and sat. "I _told_ you I was finishing the potion today," he said softly. "I got waylaid for _five_ minutes, talking to Professor Flitwick about my essay, you thought the potion couldn't wait _five minutes_?"

"It needed doing," was her only response.

"Not by you," Al stressed. "That's what you have me for! That's why I'm here – to do the piddly little things like brew potions so you don't have to worry about them, and so you don't have to worry about —" He broke off, shaking his head, and took a deep breath, deciding it was best to change the subject. "Healer Bones says you'll make a full recovery in a week or two, but it _is_ going to take that long, and you _are_ going to have to sit and rest, much as you might hate that. Mungo's will send over a temporary replacement, I'm sure, and that Healer and I will _take care_ of things around here until you're back on your feet. And in the future –"

"Al, I'm retiring."

The words stopped him cold. He frowned at her, mouth open. "What?" he finally got out.

"I've asked Mungo's to send a permanent replacement. I'll oversee the transition in the next few weeks, but the new Healer will take over by the end of the year, and it is my hope –"

"No, no, stop," Al said, interrupting, almost frantic. "What are you talking about?"

"It's time," she said gently. "It's past time, I think. I shouldn't have let you cover for me this long."

"That's not — I haven't —"

"It's time," she said again, still gentle, more gently than she'd ever spoken to him, a fact that was cutting through the fog of his brain. "I've gotten slow."

"No, you haven't," was his immediate response. She looked at him sternly.

"Rule number one. Never lie to your patient."

He looked away sharply, jaw tight. "Not noticeably," he finally said, voice small and quiet. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw her smile, a tiny, sad one.

"I've noticed," she said. "You've noticed. Two is more than enough, but I think after this, the number is higher, don't you?"Al didn't answer, because to answer was to acknowledge the truth of what she was saying. But she knew him too well, and his non-answer was answer enough. "You told me once that you wanted to learn from me because I was the best. I'm not anymore."

"I have two years left," Al said, almost pleading. "Okay? Two years. We can hold this place together for that long!"

She gave him that look, the one he hated more than all the others, the one he got when she felt he was being foolish. He looked away, cheeks burning. "You are fifteen years old," she said. "You haven't even passed your OWL tests. You have learned a lot in three years, and someday, you will be a great Healer, but what happens if I need to brew Pepper-Up for the professors while you're home over Christmas holidays? Or prepare an emergency remedy while you're in class? Or perform a delicate spell that you haven't mastered? I do not doubt your abilities, but I am your teacher and your Healer, and you are a student at this school, and I do you a disservice if I don't see to it that you and your peers have the best care that can be offered. And beyond all that, it's time you learned from someone new."

"No!" Al's head came straight up at that, the word coming out choked and vehement.

"Al–"

"I don't want to learn from anyone who isn't you!"

"Then you don't want to be a Healer," was her sharp reply. "Because that's the job. You learn all you can _from_ all you can. If you don't want to learn from anyone but a school nurse who hasn't been up to date on new medical practices and advancements for 67 years, then you don't want to be a Healer, and my trust in you has been misplaced." Al studied his hands intensely and blinked back tears. He heard a soft sigh, and then one of her wrinkled, bandaged hands reached out and covered his. Slowly he raised his head. "It's my fault," she said softly. "I thought I could make it. I thought I could last the next two years out, with your help. But I shouldn't have put that on you. Or rather, I shouldn't have let you take it on yourself."

Gently, Al turned his hand over and gripped hers, offering a small smile. "It was never any trouble," he said, and she let out a short laugh.

"That may have been the problem," she said wryly.

Al laughed, and with the laugh, the fight went out of him. He knew where the conversation would go if he kept arguing; he'd taken so many conversations with Madame Pomfrey to the same place in the past – _This is not a discussion or debate, Mr. Potter. I'm not asking for your opinion; I am telling you how things are going to be._ So instead of fighting, he took a deep breath and just said, "I'm going to miss you."

Madame Pomfrey sniffed. "I shall miss you as well," she said after a pause, and if her eyes were shining, Al certainly wasn't going to mention it. "But don't worry, Mr. Potter. After 67 years, I have some clout. I won't let you be taught by anyone mediocre or apathetic."

"Perish the thought," Al said with a quirk of a smile. She patted his hand then, twice.

"Send Healer Bones in on your way out, would you?" Al nodded and stood, pushing back the dividing curtain as he started for the door. "Al?" He stopped and turned. "I want you to know . . . how proud I am of you."

The words brought unseemly tears to his eyes, and he swallowed them, hard. "Thank you," he said sincerely. "For everything."

A week later, she was gone, and a the new Hogwarts Matron was arriving, and Al was very noticeably absent. It wasn't that he didn't want to meet whoever she was, it was just, he didn't think he could watch someone new move into Madame Pomfrey's space.

But the time came when he knew he couldn't put it off any longer, so, with a deep breath, he headed out of his dorm and for the Hospital Wing – and was met with a very puzzling sight.

The hall outside the infirmary was crowded with students, all young men, and the doors to the infirmary were shut fast. "Um, what's going on?" Al asked of a sixth year he just barely recognized. "Why are all these people here?"

"Oh, well, I don't know about all these fakers, but _I'm_ sick," the sixth year said, coughing for good measure. Al raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"Me, too!" called someone else in earshot.

"Me, too!" echoed down the hall, and then a chorus of coughing broke out around him.

"What the hell is going on?" Al demanded. The sixth year pulled him aside.

"Have you _seen_ the new nurse who's replacing Pomfrey?" he asked in an undertone. "Trust me, once you do, you'll come down with something, too."

Al refrained from rolling his eyes, choosing instead to paste a smile on his face and force his way through the crowd. _Idiots_ , he thought uncharitably as he went. Dealing with lust-driven male population of Hogwarts was the last thing the new Matron needed.

"Well," he called in a loud, cheerful voice when he'd reached the front of the queue. "Shame to see you all so suddenly ill on a Saturday! Luckily, we've got plenty of Pepper-Up potion for you all, and as you know, I'm the matron's assistant, and the common cold falls under the things that I treat, so I'll just step inside and grab a cauldron and treat you all right here, since there's no need to bother the new matron on her first day with such minor problems, right?"

And he gave them all his most winning smile as, gradually, the crowd dispersed, grumbling and complaining as they went. When the last would-be patient had disappeared, Al turned to the infirmary doors — to find Healer Bones standing there, watching him with a smile.

"Madame Pomfrey told me you'd be an asset," she said, "but I didn't realize just how much of one! I'll have to chase off the hoards again at some point, I'm sure, but I'm glad I don't have to bother on my first day."

"Healer Bones," Al said, confused. "What are you still doing here?"

"It's Madame Bones now," she said, "and I'm starting my new job. I'm glad you're here, Al. I want to talk to you about NEWT classes, and I want to talk to you about internships opportunities, and I want to talk to you about the branches of magical study Mungo's supports, but right now, I need to talk to you about Madame Pomfrey's ongoing treatments and medication distribution system. Are you ready?"

It took Al only a minute to find his voice. "Yes, ma'am, I am," he said, and Madame Bones's smile grew.

"Then let's get started."

With a smile of his own, Al let himself be ushered through the doors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know what you're all going to say - FINALLY.
> 
> Yes. It's been a while since I've been able to update this. Thank you all for your patience, and I hope you enjoyed this closer look at Al.
> 
> Al, like Rose and Scorpius before him, has already been written about extensively (in Among Thorn, Fighting Briars, and Tending Roses), and will be written about even more in the future (the forthcoming, as-of-yet-untitled story of him and Honoria Ridgeton), but unlike Rose and Scorpius, I knew exactly what I would write about for his moment here.
> 
> A variation of this scene was originally included in Tending Roses, but I had to cut it for flow. It was a story I always wanted to return to, though - how Al came to be Madame Pomfrey's right-hand-assistant during his time at Hogwarts, and what an important mentor she would be for him.
> 
> And for those of you saying, "But wait! Didn't Hannah Abbott replace Madame Pomfrey? And wasn't it in 2014, not 2020?" I say that Rita Skeeter is a liar and you can't trust anything she says, and I've had my headcanon for this universe established for years, so there! :)
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you soon with Lily's moment!


	10. Lily Potter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lily Potter

_Lily_

Lily Potter couldn't remember ever being so nervous in her life.

 _No_ , she corrected herself firmly. _I'm not nervous. I'm not nervous because I'm Lily Potter, and Lily Potter doesn't_ get _nervous. Ask anyone._

It was true, that people would say this of her. Ask anyone at Hogwarts about Lily Potter, and they'd tell you how fun she was, how bubbly, cheerful, energetic – sometimes annoyingly so – and how she never took anything too seriously. That's what everyone thought of Lily. Maybe she was a little silly, maybe she was a little air-headed, but she was always a good time.

Lily was glad this was what people thought of her. It was what she _wanted_ people to think of her, because it hid her secret, the secret she'd been hiding since she was seven years old and had first realized how uncomfortable her secret made the people around her.

But sitting outside Professor Longbottom's office, waiting to go in for that dreaded Career Advice meeting, Lily was aware that she was hovering at a crossroads, and that her secret couldn't be kept secret much longer. And that — well, if she'd been anyone other than Lily Potter, that would have made her nervous.

The door opened, and one of Lily's Gryffindor year-mates came out and smiled at her. She tried to smile back, but didn't quite manage it, and the classmate walked away thinking, _Lily Potter actually looks_ nervous _. I've never seen that before_. If Lily had realized that these were his thoughts, she'd have made more of an effort to smile, toss her hair, and give him one of those flirting glances that promised a world she never actually delivered. But she didn't see. And so he walked away startled by the surprising change in his usually cheery classmate.

"Miss Potter?"

Five years here, and she still hadn't gotten used to hearing Uncle Neville call her Miss Potter. She hadn't gotten used to calling him Professor Longbottom, either.

She stood, wiping her hands on her robe – nervously – and entered.

His office was cool, as it always was. He had two, and they couldn't have been more different. His greenhouse office was bright and sunny and warm, full of tropical plants that made the air pleasantly humid and heavy with the scent of spices and blossoms. But his castle office, given to him when he'd been named Head of Gryffindor House, was always cool. On the lee side of a westward tower, it barely saw the sun, and since Uncle Neville could never inhabit a space without plants, he'd decorated this office accordingly, with things like pitcher plants, maidenhair ferns, rex begonias, coleus, and spider ivy. Most people preferred his greenhouse office. Lily preferred this one.

She entered as she always did, pausing to run a gentle finger up the spine of his Mimosa Pudica just to watch the leaves close up behind her. Then she sat at his desk and tried to smile.

"How are you, Lily?" he asked warmly, and really, was it any wonder she couldn't remember to call him Professor Longbottom when he was running around calling her "Lily" at every turn?

"I'm good," she said, and she almost sounded like she meant it, but he knew her too well.

"There's nothing to be nervous about," he said kindly. "We're just having a conversation."

"A conversation you're gonna tell my dad about?" she asked, eyes meeting his in something of a challenge. He frowned slightly.

"Are you worried about that?" he asked, doing that irritating thing where he answered her questions with questions.

"A little," she said.

"Despite my friendship with them, I don't keep your parents up to date on every single thing you and your brothers do here, you know." His voice was a bit wry, and if this was less serious, Lily might have smiled.

"But you tell them the big stuff," she pushed, not really asking a question. Uncle Neville considered her.

"Are you about to drop some big stuff on me, Lily?" he asked, and he was so frustratingly unreadable!

"Are you gonna tell my dad?" she repeated, lifting her chin in challenge. Professor Longbottom sighed.

"Career Advice meetings are confidential," he assured her. "Your parents won't find out what we talk about here unless you tell them."

Lily nodded, her focus on the desktop as she took several deep breaths, steeling herself to say out loud the words she'd been rehearsing in her room for a week now. On one last deep inhale, she brought her eyes up to his.

"I want to be an Unspeakable," she said. "I want to study death."

By the time Lily was five years old, she'd almost died three times.

At six and a half months pregnant, Ginny Potter had accepted an invitation from her old friend Luna Scamander to go on an expedition to South America to track a colony of the rare Golden Snidgets. Ginny had been hoping to branch out from Quidditch commentary at the _Prophet_ , and had thought that might be the way to do it. She had gone on the trip over Harry's very strong objections, arguing that she still had two and a half months before the kid was supposed to be born, and that even if something did happen, she'd never be too far from help.

Well, something had happened – whether as a result of the trip or the trek through the rainforest or whether it was just something that would have happened had Ginny stayed home, Lily had decided to come early, on the one day that Ginny and Luna were alone in the depths of the South America rainforest. She and her mother might both have died if not for Luna's knowledge and presence of mind. She'd delivered Lily safely, and performed the necessary spells and charms to compensate for her premature development until both Lily and Ginny had been taken to the nearest Magical hospital. Luna had been in line to be godmother already, but that had solidified the choice.

Then, when Lily was two years old, they'd discovered at someone's birthday party that she was deathly allergic to strawberries, of all things. She'd been sitting at the kids table eating her strawberry shortcake when all of a sudden, she couldn't breathe (Lily vaguely remembered this). Luckily, her cousin Dominique had noticed and had run for the nearest adult, and again, Lily's godmother Luna had saved her life with a Muggle device called an Epipen (her husband Rolf was allergic to bee stings and had found the Epipen more reliable than magic, so he always had one with him). Grandmother Molly had gone on about the horrors of stabbing a child with a needle, but Luna had calmly remarked that wizards didn't hold the corner on the market of medical advancements, and that anti-anaphylaxis spells were all well and good until you needed one and everyone around you didn't know them or was underage. To this day, Lily had an Epipen prescription and carried it with her, just in case.

And at four, she'd somehow contracted bacterial meningitis, a mostly Muggle illness that was even more terrifying than its name sounded. It was her Aunt Audrey who had come to the rescue then. Aunt Audrey was a Muggle psychologist who had recognized the symptoms and rushed her to a Muggle hospital. That had been the closest Lily had come to dying, and it was the one she remembered most definitely. The further she got from that day, the less certain she was about whether her memories were real or tricks of her dangerously high fever, but _something_ had happened. There had been a beautiful place, white and full of light and music, and people who looked familiar but who she'd never met, and she'd wanted to go to them. And she almost had, but one of them, a woman who looked like her, but had Al's bright green eyes, had said, "No, sweetheart. Not yet. Go back to your Mum and Dad, little Lily."

Her brushes with death had had three effects on the rest of her life.

First, she was just a little frailer than most children her age. She was a little weaker, a little slower, a little more prone to falling ill, and she walked with just the tiniest hint of a limp leftover from the fever. She grew out of these tendencies the older she got, but no one really seemed to recognize that.

Second, her family, especially her parents, _especially_ her dad, were terrified of losing her. She knew that their protectiveness of her was just because they loved her and they wanted to make sure she was safe, but it was stifling sometimes, to have so many things she wasn't allowed to do. She loved the time she spent with her godmother Luna because Auntie Luna was one of the only people in her life who didn't come with a list of restrictions. She loved her parents and brothers, too, of course she did, but she spent a lot of time wishing that they'd let her live her own life.

And third, she was _fascinated_ with death. She thought about it all the time, wanting to know _why_ people died and _how_ they died and what happened to them _after_ they died. When she was young, she had chattered about it all the time, even talking about the people she'd seen in the white place when she saw them again in her dad's photo album.

"Hey, I know her!" she had said at age seven, pointing at the red-haired woman in the wedding picture.

"Well, of course you do, sweetheart," her dad had said with a laugh. "That's your grandma Lily. My mum."

"No," Lily had said like it was any other piece of information. "It's the lady who told me to come back to you and Mummy when I was sick! I was gonna go to the white place, but she said not to. She was nice. And her voice sounded like sunshine. And they were there, too!" She'd pointed at the two men in the photo then, noticing belatedlyhow white and still her dad had gone. "Daddy?" she'd whispered. She'd hated the way he was staring at her. "Daddy? Did I say something wrong?"

"No," he'd assured her, but his voice was choked, and he'd held her really tight after that, and she hadn't quite believed him.

She started noticing after that, the way that no one really liked it when she asked about death and dying. So she'd stopped. She put a smile on her face and acted bright and sunny, like she didn't think about those things, so that the people around her would stop wearing those worried faces when they looked at her. She'd stopped talking about it for eight years now, but she'd never stopped thinking about it. And now she'd told Uncle Neville.

To be honest, she'd kind of expected the world to stop when she said those words in his office. _I want to be an Unspeakable. I want to study death._ She expected him to stare at her, to gape open-mouthed, to be shocked and stunned into silence.

But here he was, nodding, and rifling through the pamphlets on his desk until he found the one he was looking for, black and shiny, with just a question mark and the Ministry Seal embossed in dark grey on top, and requiring an illumination spell to read the material inside.

And he didn't ask "What?" or for a clarification or repetition. He just rolled his eyes at the pamphlet and then said, "Well, Lily, the Unspeakables are the elite. They only take the best. They require the highest NEWT marks in Potions, Herbology, Transfiguration, Astronomy, Charms, _and_ Defense Against the Dark Arts, and that's a serious caseload to take on. So if you're —"

"Wait!" Lily said, flustered and confused. He looked up at her in question. "Aren't you — what are you doing?"

"I'm advising you on your career options," Uncle Neville said. "What are _you_ doing?"

"Aren't you shocked?" she demanded. "That happy little happy-go-lucky Lily wants to study _death_?"

Uncle Neville raised an eyebrow. "Should I be?" he asked.

"Yes!" she said, with some exasperation. "I've spent eight years _being_ happy-go-lucky so that people wouldn't know this was what I thought about all the time!"

"Lily," Uncle Neville said, "I remember the questions you ran around asking when you were a kid. And you wrote me three and a half rolls of parchment on how the interaction of the properties of asphodel and wormwood control the fine line between sleeping and dying in the Draught of the Living Death – I put two and two together." Lily looked at her hands, chagrined. After a moment's silence, he spoke again, a question this time. "Have you really been playing cheerful and air-headed to throw people off the scent?" Lily nodded, but didn't look up. "Lils, you shouldn't hide what you're passionate about."

Lily snorted. "Actually, sometimes, you probably should," she said. "I mean, do you know how people look at you when you're seven and you walk around chattering about death all the time? Do you know how your _dad_ looks at you?"

It was more than she intended to reveal, but it slipped out, and he understood immediately. She looked away again. "Lily," he said, softly, clearly collecting his thoughts as he spoke. "Lily, your dad . . . has lived a life defined by death and loss. And just when he thought he was past it, you—"

Lily held up a hand to stop him. "You don't have to give me the explanation," she said. "I've read his biography. And I get it. I do. But I'd do just about anything to keep him from looking like that ever again. But this is all I've ever wanted to do, Uncle Neville. It's all I can imagine myself ever doing. Trying to find the answers to the questions that have plagued me my whole life."

She watched carefully though her eyelashes as he considered this, and then nodded. "You know you're going to have to tell him sometime, though, right?" he finally said.

"Yeah, see, I was thinking maybe I wouldn't, actually?" she said then, in a rush. "Like, I was thinking that I could just get into the program, and be an Unspeakable, and never tell anybody like my dad exactly what it is I study, since I don't think I'd be allowed?"

"Well, that's an interesting theory," Uncle Neville said dryly, "but if you stay on your current track, Lily, it's not going to be an issue, because right now, you don't have the marks to get accepted as an Unspeakable."

Lily froze. "What do you mean?" she asked in a small voice. Uncle Neville sighed.

"This is what I saying before," he said seriously. "The Department of Mysteries only takes the _elite_ , Lils, only the _highest_ NEWT scores. They require you to take and sit exams for six NEWT classes. _Six_. Most students balk at four. And they'll only accept less than Outstanding in two of them, only one if that mark is lower than Exceeds Expectations. I'm not saying you can't do it. I know you're a smart girl, and I know you're smarter than you let on. You wrote me three and a half rolls of parchment on how the interaction of the properties of asphodel and wormwood control the fine line between sleeping and dying in the Draught of the Living Death. But if you're serious about this, you need to buckle down, because right now, you don't have the marks to get _into_ half the NEWT classes you need." He was shuffling through her class file now. "Transfiguration, Astronomy, and Potions, you need to get them all up, and honestly, Lils, your Herbology mark skims closer to the A line than I want it to."

His words went straight to her core, and she sat straighter in her chair, a crease of worry between her eyebrows. "I want this," she told him. "I want to be an Unspeakable. Tell me what I have to do, Professor."

Uncle Neville smiled. "All right," he said. "You've got six months to get your class scores and test scores to a level where the staff will feel confident letting you take on a six-class courseload. I'll help you in any way I can, Lily. So let's work out a schedule."

For the next half hour, they bent together over his desk, arranging tutors and scheduling study sessions, outlining expectations and planning class strategies. Lily thought her head might burst open with the weight of it all, but she was determined. She could and would do this.

"I think you're well on your way," Uncle Neville said as she gathered up her things. "And I'll be checking in with you once a week, okay?" She nodded. "And Lily?" he hesitated for a moment, then continued. "Every person alive wonders about death. Everyone wants to know what's next. You just aren't afraid of it the way most people are. And that's nothing to be ashamed of, okay?"

"You think I should tell my dad," she said, filling in the words left unsaid.

"I think you should tell your dad," he confirmed. "I think you might be surprised to hear how much insight he has to offer. And I think it will be good for him to see his daughter for who she really is. If you'll let him."

Lily studied the floor. "I'll . . . think about it," she finally said. He smiled and stood.

"That's enough for now," he said. "After all, you've got a lot of other things to focus on at the moment."

It wasn't professional, and it wasn't exactly proper, but she hugged him hard before she left. "Thank you, Uncle Neville," she said. He ruffled her hair.

"Any time, Lils."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lily is another one of those characters who I feel gets the short stick in fandom, and again, I'm guilty of it to. So when I started to think about what direction I wanted to take her, I looked into what would be a contrast to the happy peppy chatterbox most people seem to write. And I thought about what that might be in place to mask.
> 
> I've also been fascinated for a while with medicine in the magical world. Like, it's clear from the series that not everything can be fixed with a simple spell or potion. And we hear about Dragon Pox, but do wizards never get chicken pox? Or pneumonia or cancer? And if stitches and surgery are considered so gruesome, do wizard kids never get shots? What about the kids with food or medicine allergies? What are the equivalents?
> 
> So I decided to give Lily an illness-prone backstory, and see how that might define her. And I wanted to see how Harry would handle having a child fascinated by death, a child who had so many brushes with it. We'll get into that father/daughter relationship more in Lily and Hugo and Lucy's spin-off piece.


	11. Hugo Weasley

_Hugo_

Hugo Weasley's life changed forever when he was five years old, the day he first sat down at a piano and fitted his fingers to the keys.

Plenty of people couldn't remember the moments that changed their lives – they were too young or too distracted or the moment's importance didn't become clear until much later. But Hugo remembered.

Hugo remembered every piece and part of that day with perfect clarity. The smell of the runner carpet in his grandmother's hallway (dust and wood varnish), the feel of the plush giving way to wood under his cheek, the sound of Chrissy Michaelson adding an extra beat and a half to a few measures of Bach's Gavotte in D as she stumbled through a difficult run. He remembered daring to peek around the corner, remembered his Grandma Granger asking Chrissy if he could watch, remembered being captivated by the sight of her curved fingers flying across the black and ivory keys.

And he remembered the feeling of his heart in his throat when he'd been the last one left in the parlor, Chrissy going to the porch to wait for her mum, Gram going to the kitchen to make lunch. He hadn't been able to believe he'd been left alone with the instrument – it seemed a tremendous oversight – but he'd immediately taken advantage.

He remembered sliding across the smooth wooden bench, the edge digging into the back of his knees, feeling the weight of his feet at the end of his legs as they swung a good six inches above the ground. He could still hear the sound of his exhale in the still room as he brought his hands up and rested his small fingers on the cool keys, wondering if he could recreate the music he'd watched Chrissy make.

He could, it turned out.

It took him two tries, his first timid depression of the keys not heavy enough to win a sound. But his second try? He played exactly what Chrissy had played, extra beat and a half and all. He could still play Bach's Gavotte in D with his eyes closed (extra beat and a half and all), and though it was a simple children's etude, it remained his favorite piece because it had introduced him to a magic far more impressive than anything he'd seen any of his family members do with a wand.

From the time he was five years old, Hugo Weasley had been a pianist first and anything else, wizard included, second.

Grandma Granger had been his first teacher. Though she'd gone into dentistry, she'd also been a talented pianist herself, and after retiring, she had gone back to teaching music. On the day that Hugo's world became much more magical, she had entered the parlor, expecting to find Chrissy back at the piano, practicing the etude still giving her trouble while she waited for her ride. She'd been astounded to find Hugo, playing as if he'd been playing for years rather than moments. Her footsteps had startled him, and he'd snatched his fingers away from the instrument, silence jarring into the room as he bit his lip, terrified of being caught in wrongdoing and scolded. But Grandma Granger hadn't scolded.

"Hugo, was that you?"

A nod.

"Have you ever played before?"

A shake.

"Would you like to learn?"

A widening of the eyes, a gasp, an outburst of "Oh, yes! Could I really?"

He'd never looked back.

The piano became his life. While his cousins played pick-up Quidditch and Quadspot and Capture the Flag, Hugo played Tchaikovsky and Copland and Yiruma. While they spent hours running around the orchard and fields surrounding the Burrow, he spent hours at the piano his mother set up in a back room every time they visited (he'd insisted that she replicate the one they had at home, transporting it rather than the original because he was convinced all that magic and Shrinking and Enlarging _couldn't_ be good for the strings. His mother said he was worrying over nothing, but Hugo _knew_ he heard a difference). And while his family went to Quidditch finals and Hogsmeade visits and trips to Diagon Alley, Hugo went to concerts and recitals and competitions, with his parents and grandmother and new, more advanced teachers in tow.

Which wasn't to say that Hugo didn't enjoy flying around the meadow on a broomstick and spending his summers with his cousins and aunts and uncles. But his heart and soul belonged to the piano, and it was back to the piano he always drifted, and he was never without an audience. His cousins and aunts and uncles loved hearing him play almost as much as he loved to play for them, and they were all frequently in the audience at Hugo's various concerts and recitals and competitions.

By the time he was ten, he was well known in the Muggle musical world. He had won his fair share of competitions, been touted as a child prodigy, been filmed and gathered a following on YouTube. When he and his family walked down a Muggle street to or from some performance venue, it was much more likely that Hugo would be recognized than Harry Potter. He'd been nervous about that the first time it had happened, but his uncle had just laughed and called it "quite refreshing."

But Hugo was never in any of it for the recognition or the acclaim or the trophies littering his bedroom. He was just in it for the music. He just wanted to play. The idea of a world where he didn't have hours in his day to sit down at his piano and make the best magic he could imagine? Not a world he wanted to live in.

He composed his first piece when he was eight, just a short little song for Mother's Day that he thought his mum would like, and he couldn't figure out why he liked it less the more he played it until he realized that it didn't _sound_ like his mum. Once he figured that out, composing came much easier to him.

He never consciously made the decision that he was going to write a piano piece for every member of his family, but by the time he was ten, it was something he knew as well as his own name. Some came easily to him – Rose's and Lily's and Lucy's – but others were more elusive – Victoire's and Uncle Percy's and Roxie's. But, he reasoned, he had time. He'd only just achieved double digits, after all.

The summer after he turned eleven, his admission letter to Hogwarts was brought to the Burrow by his Uncle Neville, along with Lily's and Lucy's, and all the girls could talk about was how excited they were to finally be going and how they couldn't wait to take the school by storm and how they'd be the best Potter-Weasley trio since James and Molly and Fred (who would be fourth years, so they were basically on their way out).

But Hugo couldn't join in. All he could do was stare at the parchment as a horrible realization hit him in the stomach. "I can't go," he said softly, his words cutting through the girls' chatter.

"What?" Lily asked, frowning like she knew she hadn't heard him right. He looked up.

"I can't go," he said, louder, and before they could ask the questions they clearly wanted to, he left the room, full of an anxious, nervous energy he couldn't shake. He had to find his parents, though he wasn't looking forward to that conversation, either.

It was even harder when his parents weren't alone. They were in the sitting room with his Uncle Harry and Aunt Ginny and Uncle Neville. He interrupted them in the middle of some funny story – they were all laughing and happy, and that made him even more miserable.

It was Uncle Harry who saw him first. "Hey, Hugh," he said with a smile. "So have you and Lily and Lucy already figured out which Houses you'll be in and how to decorate your beds?" Hugo gave a tight smile at that but didn't respond.

"Mum, Dad," he said, barreling through before he could lose his nerve. "I've thought about it, and I've decided that I'm sorry, but I really don't think I can go to Hogwarts. I really don't think it's the best fit for me, so I'd like to do what I've been doing, just learning from Dad and private teachers. Thanks." And just like with Lily and Lucy, he left before anyone had the chance to voice any questions.

He went straight to the unofficial music room and shut the door and launched into some Beethoven because he needed pounding, angry music so that the swirly anxiety in his stomach didn't take over everything. He played the sonata with a bit more force than was probably required, but it helped give him something else to focus on.

He heard the door open, but whoever stepped inside didn't interrupt the music, so he kept playing. "I can't not play for ten months," he finally said without looking up from the keys.

"You think your mother and I would ever ask you to?" A glance over his shoulder revealed his father standing in the doorway. Hugo turned back to the keys.

"Hogwarts doesn't offer music classes. There aren't any piano professors or practice rooms. How am I supposed to play?"

"Have I told you the story about Prince Billy, Princess Jean, and General Melville's Secret Tunnel to the Mysterious Disappearing Room?" his dad asked, coming over and sitting beside the piano. Hugo let his hands slide off the keys, cutting the song short.

"Dad, I'm eleven," he said. "You don't have to use Prince Billy to tell me things anymore."

His dad smiled. "Old habits," he said. "How about the time Prince Hugo met Consuela Suñez? Have I told you that one?"

Hugo gave his dad a look. "Trust me, Dad, if I'd ever met one of the greatest wizarding pianists alive, I'd remember it. But what does the Room of Requirement have to do with Conseula Suñez? And what does any of it have to do with playing at Hogwarts?" His dad's eye twinkled.

"Well, when your Uncle Neville was at school, he became the reigning expert on the Room of Requirement, and so, when it became clear to your mother and I that we would have to find a way for your music to continue at Hogwarts if we wanted you to be educated there, we sent some owls. Your Uncle Neville's done some work with the Room, and Mum and I have talked at length with Miss Suñez, and starting in September, the Room will, once a week, open a passage between Hogwarts and the Wizarding Academy for the Dramatic Arts so that Miss Suñez can come teach you. The rest of the time, the Room will be available to you as a practice room for you to play away in to your heart's content, as long as it doesn't interfere with your schoolwork."

Hugo's heart was in his throat. He didn't dare believe what his dad was saying, not right away. "Really, Dad?" he asked, because he had to be sure this wasn't some giant joke. "Really?"

His dad laughed. "Really. And we have an appointment tomorrow to meet with Miss Suñez, who is looking forward to hearing you play. So. Will you go to Hogwarts now?"

Hugo had launched himself into his father's arms before he had finished asking the question. "Yes, yes, yes!" And he was up and running back to the sitting room to launch himself into his mother's arms and hug her just as enthusiastically. "Thank you, thank you, _thank you_!" he shouted.

"I take it your dad told you?" his mom asked with a smile. Hugo beamed up at her.

"You're the best mum ever. And you're the best uncle ever," he said to Neville, still sitting a ways away. Uncle Neville laughed, while Uncle Harry looked indignant.

"Anything for you, Hugh," Uncle Neville said. "Now, do you suppose I could trouble you to play for me before I go?"

Hugo was happy to oblige.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never thought I'd write a piece of Harry Potter fanfiction with the phrase "gathered a following on YouTube" in it, but here we are. See, I've long been fascinated with the question of whether or not all Muggleborns who come to Hogwarts choose to stay in the Wizarding World, or if there are some who get their schooling, graduate, and prefer to return to a Muggle, magicless life. Therefore, I really wanted to look at putting one of my next gen characters in a position to be more in the Muggle world than the magical one. I'll explore this more in depth with Hugo's shoot off, looking at what he does when he's done with Hogwarts, but that's a much later story.
> 
> This Hugo is clearly not the same Hugo from We Stand and Face the Storm, but there are distinct similarities. Both are fairly quiet and unassuming. Both are close with Rose. Both are Ravenclaws. But this Hugo clearly is more comfortable in the spotlight. And over the course of the last year or so, he has gone from being the cousin I knew the least about to being the cousin I know really the most about. I expected a lot more information to come out in this moment - his sexuality, his career aspirations, his relationship with Lily and Lucy - but this is where the moment took me, so the rest of that will have to wait.


	12. Lucy Weasley

_Lucy_

Lucy Weasley had a plan.

People were always tempted to assume that the seed of this plan had been planted by her godfather, Oliver Wood, but this was not, strictly speaking, true. Uncle Oliver may have given Lucy her first toy broomstick before she was old enough to walk, but he also despaired of her ever coming to love Quidditch when it became clear that she only rode the broomstick when he visited and cajoled her into it.

"It's such a waste!" he said to Lucy's father on her fifth birthday, when she had abandoned the toy after her one obligatory lap around the garden, in search of more interesting pursuits. "She's a natural just like Molly! Did you see that seat?"

"Are you begrudging me one daughter who might take after me?" Percy asked his best friend wryly, and though Oliver sighed and allowed the point, the conversation kept coming back around to ways he could trick Lucy into liking Quidditch and wanting to play.

Lucy's Aunt Angelina listened to that conversation while at the same time keeping a close eye on what Lucy had chosen to go do instead of fly, and when she heard Lucy making a game out of catching the "garden Snitches" zipping through her grandmother's daisy patch, Aunt Angelina made a decision.

Lucy, whose attention was solely on the black beetles darting through the air, didn't hear her aunt approach until she spoke, asking the question Uncle Oliver had never thought to. "Lucy, why don't you like the toy broomstick?"

Lucy looked up at her aunt, the beetle she had just caught flying free with her inattention to it. "'Cause it doesn't _do_ anything," she said, and her aunt smiled.

"Would you like to ride on a _real_ broomstick?" her aunt asked then. "One that _does_ do something?"

Lucy hesitated for only a moment, her eyes flicking to the pasture where her cousins flew above the treeline. "Yes," she whispered, and Aunt Angelina, unnoticed by Lucy's parents or godfather, took her over to the broomshed.

What followed was one of the defining moments of Lucy's life. They took off, shooting upward with a speed her little toy couldn't even imagine. Lucy shrieked with delight as they shot through the air, and _then_ her parents took notice.

But Aunt Angelina ignored Percy's protests, paying attention instead to Lucy's gasps and cheers and happy screams of laughter. They flew once, twice, three times around the pasture, climbing impossibly high, diving with gravity-defying flips of her stomach back toward the earth. When they landed, all Lucy could say was, "Again, again, again!"

"For future reference, Oliver," Aunt Angelina said with a grin as he and Lucy's mum and dad all ran over, "there are two possibilities if a kid doesn't like flying on a toy broomstick. Either they don't like flying, or they don't like flying a _toy_ broomstick. I was the second. Looks like Miss Lucy Loo is too."

Lucy took the opportunity to beg, "Again, again, please Daddy, please can I again? _Please_?"

For a moment, her dad hesitated, looking back and forth between her mum and her godfather and her Aunt Angelina, but then he looked down at her again, all eager, earnest pleadings. After a moment, he dropped his head, shook it, and laughed. "Sure," he said with a good-natured sigh. "If your aunt agrees."

"And if she doesn't, I'll take you up myself!" her godfather said.

Lucy's feet barely touched the ground the rest of the afternoon. Percy drew the line at any of her cousins taking her up, but between Oliver, Angelina, Ginny, Harry, Ron, Bill, and Charlie, there were plenty of brooms ready to take the birthday girl on another flight.

When it became dark enough that not even her godfather would take her up anymore, she settled for pestering him with question after question about brooms and flying and Quidditch, all of which he was more than happy to answer. Two days later, an owl delivered _Q is for Quidditch: A Young Wizard's First Alphabet_ , and Lucy made her parents read it to her over and over until she had the whole thing memorized and wandered around her house chanting, "Q is for Quaffle, the ball that can score/If you watch this ball, the game's never a bore!/Three Chasers per team pass it fast as they fly/To score at the goalposts, each 50 feet high!"

For her sixth birthday, she convinced her parents (with her sister's help) to buy her a starter racing broom. "After all," Molly told them, "if you don't, Uncle Oliver probably will, and you know he'll show up with a Firebolt LP."

Once she'd acquired a broom she could actually fly for herself, Lucy's plan came into being.

The plan was simple. She would spend the time until she left for Hogwarts learning everything about Quidditch that she could, and once she was proficient at flying on her own, she would learn how to play every position on the team. At Hogwarts, she would try out for her House team her first year. She didn't expect to _make_ the team that young, but she'd make sure everyone knew her name. To keep her skills honed, she'd play on the InterHouse league. She'd make the House team her second year - any position. She wasn't picky. She hoped to be made captain by fourth year, but she knew that was something of a stretch, so she'd settle for fifth. Any later didn't bear thinking about. Once captain, she would revolutionize the way Hogwarts teams were run (because she had some major issues with their current system).

She'd lead her team to Quidditch Cup victory every year she captained, of course, and by her seventh year, all the league scouts would be watching her. She'd sign to a professional team right out of school, play pro for five to ten years (ideally playing the World Cup for England in 2030 or 2034, but she was aware that that relied on too many factors out of her hands to be an official part of her plan). She'd retire on her terms at the peak of her career, maybe coach for a while or become Flying Instructor at Hogwarts or work for the Department of Magical Games and Sports. She was willing to let that fall out however it would. Regardless, by the time she was thirty, she fully intended to have taken the Quidditch world by storm and become a household name. That was the plan.

For several years, the plan progressed unimpeded. She studied and memorized with her godfather until she knew the rules and regulations of the game backwards and forwards. She practiced her flying skills on her starter broom, then graduated first to Molly's broom, then her aunt's top of the line racing broom (snuck out of the broomshed with Molly's help), until she could ride and steer with only her legs, change direction in mid-air, complete a full loop of the pasture in under thirty seconds, and recreate all but the most challenging flying moves she'd studied with Uncle Oliver. She studied Keeping with her godfather and Uncle Ron, Chasing with Aunt Ginny and Aunt Angelina, and Seeking with Uncle Charlie and Uncle Harry (with Aunt Ginny kibitzing from the edge of the meadow).

But she hit a wall when it came to Beating. No one in her family was a Beater. When they played pick-up Quidditch, they made Uncle Bill or Aunt Audrey or Al play Beater, and none of them were very good. Molly was all right, but she didn't actually know the secrets any more than Lucy did. Lucy tried to study out of books, but there was a major difference between that and having someone who could train her in person.

She asked her godfather, but his reply was disheartening. "Sorry, Squirt," he said. "It's the one position I never had to teach. Your uncles were naturals. I never had to tell them what to do, and I doubt they'd have listened if I had."

"Wait. My uncles? Which uncles?"

Because if anyone in her family played Beater, it was news to Lucy. Her godfather froze, looking furious with himself. Then he sighed. "Your Uncle George, and his twin, Fred."

"Uncle George was a Beater?"

"Yeah, a phenomenal one."

Lucy's eyes lit up. "But this is perfect!" she said, jumping up and starting for the Burrow. Oliver stopped her with a hand.

"Luce, he doesn't play anymore," he warned, but Lucy shook him off.

"He doesn't have to," she said like it was obvious. "He just has to teach me!" And she took off for the house. Once through the back door, she shouted "Uncle George! Uncle George!"

"Whoa, there, Luce," said her father after she ran headlong into him. He held her by the shoulders. "What's up?"

"Where's Uncle George?"

"He had to go to the shop. Something exploded unexpectedly. Why do you need Uncle George?"

"He was a Beater! I don't know _why_ no one mentioned this _before_ –" She gave her dad a pointed glare, but she could have that conversation later, "– but he can teach me!"

"Hold on for a sec there, Luce." Her dad steered her into the kitchen and sat in a chair so he would be eye-level with her. She hated it when he did that. She was irritatingly short for an eleven-year-old, but did he have to rub it in? And why was he wasting her time?

"Lucy, your uncle doesn't fly anymore. He doesn't play anymore."

Lucy huffed with impatience. "Yeah, Uncle Oliver said. But I'm not _asking_ him to! He just has to give me some pointers, correct my form! I mean, yeah, it would _help_ if he'd just get on a broomstick for twenty minutes, but if he doesn't want to-"

"Lucy," her dad interrupted. "You're not listening."

"I _am_!" she protested. "I just don't see—"

"Your uncle hasn't been on a broom since his brother died."

And there it was. The reality that, if she was honest with herself, she'd known somehow this was all going to boil down to. A weight settled into her gut, a solid, heavy one that was keeping her firmly grounded, unable to get in the air. She stilled, no longer struggling to escape her father's hands gripping hers. "But," she said, and she hated how young she sounded. "But maybe . . ."

She trailed off, not knowing what the _maybe_ was. Her dad shook his head, eyes sad, and from behind her, she heard, "Your dad's right, honey." Turning, Lucy saw Aunt Angelina in the doorway to the kitchen. "Your uncle, your _uncles_ , they were two of the best Beaters I've ever known, and hands down the best team I've ever seen."

 _Not helping_ , Lucy thought dully, but she knew better than to say the words aloud.

"They flew like they were two bodies being controlled by one brain, because in many ways they were." She laughed a little at that, and Lucy felt her dad echo it. "But he hasn't flown since the war. I've tried to coax him out, but he told me it's just too hard. It's like looking in mirrors. He won't do it, because it makes it too hard to ignore what's missing."

Lucy's gaze dropped to the ground and she bit the inside of her cheek, miserable. She understood what they were telling her, along with all it's implications, but it was still devastating. "Okay," she whispered. "I won't ask."

And she kept her word. She didn't ask her Uncle George for help. Instead, she asked Molly (and James and Fred, of course), and every day that week, the four of them would trudge to the pasture first thing in the morning so that Lucy could practice hitting deactivated Bludgers with the heavy, thick Beater's club.

It didn't go well. On her broom, up in the air, she missed more of the heavy Bludgers Molly sent at her than she hit, and she only clipped the few she managed to connect with, the force of which was more likely to send her spinning wildly away than the Bludger itself. Frustrated and sore after three days of failed attempts and little progress, Fred suggested landing and getting used to hitting the Bludgers with her feet on solid ground.

She had slightly more success on the ground, but only when she planted her feet and swung the club like a cricket bat. The first time she connected with a solid _thwack!_ and sent the Bludger soaring away, Molly, James, and Fred cheered.

"That was _awesome_ , Luce!"

"Yeah, that must have been thirty feet!"

But Lucy just glowered. "It was _not_ awesome," she corrected angrily. "If I can only hit a Bludger with two feet on the ground and two hands on the club, I'm worthless!"

Molly sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "Lucy," she said, coming over, "you're eleven and you're _tiny_. The fact that you could hit a Bludger thirty feet at all is—"

"Pathetic!" Lucy interrupted. "I start at Hogwarts in less than three months! If I haven't mastered how to be a Beater on a broomstick where it counts by then, then–"

"Then you'll still be 300% better at Quidditch than most fifth years! Lucy, if you have to learn how to be a Beater at school from a team captain, it is not going to throw off your plan."

Lucy shook her head, frustrated with herself and her sister, who just didn't understand. "I just hate that I can't even try to fix it because I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

"You're fighting your club."

As one, the cousins in the pasture turned to see Uncle George leaning against the fence, watching them carefully. When he got no reaction other than open-mouthed stares, Uncle George leaned down, picked up a crabapple, and considered it. Then he looked at Lucy. "Catch this," he said, lobbing the crabapple toward her at high speed. Lucy snatched it out of the air with her left hand, since her right still held the club. "Not a coordination issue. Molls, send her that Bludger again? Lucy, one handed swing."

Wordlessly, the sisters complied. Lucy barely clipped the edge of the Bludger. "Yeah," Uncle George said with a grunt, pushing off the fence and crossing to them. "You're fighting your club. You're using it like a tool."

"Isn't it?" she asked. He grinned.

"No. It's an extension of your arm. Here." He stood behind her and wrapped his hand around both hers and the club handle. "Molls, send that Bludger again?"

Molly did, and this time, with her uncle's guidance, the club connected with a solid shock that reverberated through Lucy's entire body. The Bludger sailed out past the far gate. Molly, James, and Fred's exclamations were instantaneous and enthusiastic. Lucy just stood, breathless, eyes locked on where the Bludger had landed. "That . . . was . . . that was _amazing_!" she finally said, and her uncle laughed.

"Not too shabby," he agreed. "Now, then. What are you riding these days?"

"A Comet 780."

Uncle George frowned, considering. "No," he finally said. "That won't do what we need. Okay. You three," he called to Molly, James, and Fred, "get your brooms. We're going up in the air. You," he said to Lucy, "come with me."

The older three just stood, staring, especially Fred, who looked like he wasn't entirely convinced it was his dad standing in the pasture with them. But when Uncle George turned and headed for the broomshed, all four cousins scrambled to catch up. As Uncle George took out Aunt Angelina's Firebolt LP, Fred called, "Hey, uh, Dad? Are you sure about that? I mean, you know how Mum gets when people take her broom without permission."

"No, I know how she gets when _you_ take her broom without permission," Uncle George said with a grin, ruffling Fred's hair. "But I know your Mum's broom can handle flying me and Luce at the same time and not get sluggish."

"But, wait, Uncle George," Lucy said, her brain finally catching up with what was happening. "I thought my dad said you hadn't been flying since the war."

The air between the five of them came alive with that comment as Uncle George quieted and Fred went absolutely still. Lucy knew she was breaking some unspoken family rule, speaking so straightforward to her Uncle George about something most of her family carefully tiptoed around, but Uncle George just eyed her for a long moment and then said, "Yes, that's right."

"So," Lucy said slowly, and she watched and ignored Fred's widening eyes and tiny warning head shake, "what makes you think you've still got it?" she asked, which she knew was not the question anyone was expecting. "I mean, if I'm getting on a broom with you, I just want to know you're not going to crash me into the duck pond."

There was a short silence, then Uncle George burst out laughing. "That's a lot of big talk from a kid whose only been flying six years."

"I'm just saying, I could have been flying for three times as long, and you _still_ wouldn't have been on a broom for two years, so I feel like there's a good chance I could beat you in a race around the pasture with both hands tied behind my back." Her uncle's eyes twinkled.

"Is that a challenge?"

Lucy shrugged with one shoulder, hiding a smirk. "Kinda sounded like one, didn't it?"

"You want to grab your aunt Ginny's racing broom before you make a challenge like that?"

Lucy fixed her uncle with a look. "Uncle George," she said, "if you put me on a racing broom, you wouldn't stand a chance."

"Oh, yeah?"

Lucy wrinkled her nose. "Yeah."

"I don't know," Uncle George said, keeping an impressively straight face. "I'm still just hearing a lot of talk." He reached into the shed, pulled out her Comet, and tossed it to her. She caught it without breaking eye contact.

"Is this happening right now?" James whispered to Molly and Fred. Fred just nodded.

"Uh huh," he said.

"I have to go get my broom out of my bedroom, I was polishing it last night, I'll be right back," Molly said in a rush, taking off for the house.

Her broom was in the broomshed, which she was fully aware of, but she figured that someone needed to rush into the sitting room where most of her family was chatting and burst out, "Uncle George is flying with Lucy in the pasture right now. She didn't ask, he offered. He's going to teach her Beating, but right now she's challenging him to a race, and I gotta get back out there or I'm gonna miss it, but I thought you all might want to know."

There was a beat of stunned silence after her announcement and exit before everyone in the room stood and rushed for the back door.

They all reached the pasture just in time to see Lucy streak past the makeshift finish line James and Fred were holding in place, her uncle a full broom-length behind. James and Fred's cheering was instantaneous, and George's groan carried all the way across the field.

Lucy landed smoothly, dropping her broom to hover beside her while she pumped the air with her fists. "Yes!" she shouted. "I told you! Take _that_!" She pointed toward her uncle, who clutched his chest like she had wounded him, but he was grinning.

"I gave you that," he called. "I let you have it."

"No way!" Lucy crowed. "I know what pity wins look like, I give them to James all the time."

"Wait. What?" James said, but Lucy paid him no attention.

"I creamed you fair and square. Admit it!"

"There's no way you're Percy's kid," Uncle George muttered, doubling over for a moment to catch his breath. But when he straightened, he threw his head back and said, "Fine! Yes! You beat me, you win. Happy?" Lucy grinned.

"Yes," she said.

He grabbed her around the shoulders in a one-armed hug, and that's when he turned and saw the family standing at the pasture's edge, watching. For a moment, Lucy felt him stiffen, but then he took a deep breath and let it out and called, "So are you all just gonna stand there all day, or are we gonna play a training game? Lucy needs the lessons, and to be frank, I'm tired of watching Bill and Audrey disgrace the good name of Beaters everywhere."

There was another beat of silence, then the family jolted into action. "Thank you," Lucy said quietly, looking up at her uncle. He gave her shoulders another squeeze.

"Like I'd let you go off to school without your plan being right on track. Just remember who you owe it to when you're on the cover of _Quidditch World Weekly_ at eighteen, okay?"

She smiled. "Come on," she said. "It'll take them hours to get organized. Let's get started. We've wasted enough time."

"You sound like your godfather," her uncle told her, but he reached for the racing broom and the club. "Lesson one," he said as she climbed on in front of him. "There are no points. There is no scoring. Forget that red ball. It's not important. You are the team's protector. That's all that matters. Ready to fly?"

"Always," Lucy said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I said with Molly's chapter, I love giving Percy children completely different from him. I knew when I started this project that I wanted one next Gen kid to be Quidditch-crazy, and I figured that might as well be one of Percy's. Poor Percy. I abuse him so much. :) But it made sense. In my universe, Percy and Oliver Wood are best friends (another story I'll get around to writing someday), and Oliver would be Lucy's godfather, so . . . 
> 
> And I knew I wanted to take an opportunity to explore George a little more, outside of Fred's "Angry Months." He's still shadowed, he's still (obviously) affected, but I did want to show that he's healing when given reasons to. And I love the idea that he watched Lucy try for three days before he got to the "Okay, I can't take this anymore. I have to go help, it's now a matter of pride" point.
> 
> I also now really want to write the entirety of "Q is for Quidditch." Maybe as a gift for you all. We'll see. :)


	13. Roxie Weasley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am officially writing the rest of Pieces for Camp Nano this month. Timeline promises have a way of coming back to bite me in the butt, but I SHOULD have the full project completely finished by the end of April. Should.
> 
> Warning for Angelina being very ableist. She grows out of it, but it's a process.
> 
> This chapter, from start to finish and everything in between, is entirely for Maggie.

Roxanne Weasley was born deaf.

This fact did not impact her the same way it would have impacted a Muggle child, the Healers assured her parents. There were spells that would compensate for the hearing loss.

"So, she'll be normal?" Angelina asked, an edge of anxiety in her voice.

"She'll be able to hear without issue," the Healer taking their case said, "as long as the spells are in place and activated. But she will outgrow them, and as she does, they will need to be recast. For the first six months, you should bring her in to have the spells renewed every two weeks. Infants grow very quickly. After six months, we'll reassess. We'll give you some exercises to do with her at home to evaluate her hearing. If you think the spells are faltering, don't hesitate to bring her in. Language acquisition is crucial in the first two years."

Fred, at seven, was staying with his Aunt Audrey and Uncle Percy when Roxie was born. When the owl came with the news, Fred asked his Aunt Audrey what it meant that Roxie was deaf. When Aunt Audrey explained that she couldn't hear without the special spells, he frowned. "What happens to Muggles who can't hear? How d'they ever learn to talk or anything?" he asked. As soon as his aunt explained what sign language was, Fred decided that Roxie should learn.

"After all," he argued, "the spells might stop working someday. And she should know how." With a smile, his aunt found him a Muggle sign language book. The signs it didn't have, for magic related words, Fred just made up.

He didn't tell his parents what he was doing. Their mom didn't want to draw attention to Roxie's deafness by talking about it. Their dad didn't want to oppose their mom. So Fred took it on himself, making the sign as he said each word, so she'd learn them together.

Roxie signed before she spoke, asking for water or milk or her blanket or toys with her hands, in signs only her brother recognized. Their parents were astounded at the rapport the siblings had, never realizing that the gestures Roxie made were more than the usual arm-flinging of infants.

Roxie adored her older brother and the secret language she believed for many years he had created just for her. He was her best friend, and for a long time, he was the only person she could really talk to. Her parents hovered, fluttery and anxious, and she didn't understand why. She knew she was deaf, but all that meant to her was that every few months, she had to go to St Mungo's and let Healers do funny things to her ears.

And then, one morning when she was five years old, she woke up to a silent world. She didn't understand what was happening. She couldn't hear the usual morning sounds, and when she called for her mother, she couldn't hear that either. So she called louder, then louder, but though she could feel the difference in volume in her throat, it made no difference to her ears.

When her mother rushed into her room in response to Roxie's panicked screams, bathed in glowing specks of light that Roxie had never seen before, her entire world changed.

The specks were golden and warm, and they swirled through the air like living things. They were beautiful, and Roxie was captivated. When her mother pulled Roxie into her arms to comfort and reassure her, the golden specks swirled around her, too. She reached for them, watching in wonder as they wound around her fingers before spinning off through the air.

As her mother took her to Mungo's, Roxie watched the world around her in wide-eyed fascination, because the specks of light were _everywhere_. All colors of the rainbow, moving at all different speeds, gathering around each wizard and witch and wand.

When the Healer fixed her ears and the sounds came flooding back in, louder than she remembered, the lights disappeared.

"That must have been scary," her mother said when they were home again. "Do you understand what happened?"

"My ears stopped working," Roxie said, but she was no longer concerned with that. "What were the lights?"

"What lights, baby?" her mother asked, but Roxie didn't know how to explain. "I know it must have been confusing," she said when Roxie didn't answer. "But if it happens again, you know what to do. You find me and tell me, and we'll go fix it, okay?"

A year later, it did happen again. She was sitting on a high stool in her dad's workroom, watching him fiddle with some experimental project for the store. Roxie loved watching her dad work. Mum was always moving, always making noise, like she was afraid of leaving Roxie in silence for too long. But Dad was a quiet pillar of calm. She could sit in his workroom for hours and never say a word, fascinated by his process. Sometimes he'd chat about what he was working on, and sometimes she was in a talkative mood and would ask him a litany of curious questions, but usually, they slipped into companionable silence.

This day, she was watching him work, her arms resting on top of his worktable and her head resting on top of her arms, when all of a sudden, the room came to life with swirling color and light. So captivated was she with the return of the lights that she barely noticed the silence that had descended. She followed each swirl of color, counting as many different ones as she could, watching them move like leaves in a breeze, except that there was no breeze.

She looked at her father, and he was awash in red. The colors swirled most heavily around his wand, and as he waved it, the specks of light fell into line and followed the path his wand traced in the air, shooting forward to surround and change the brush sitting in front of him.

Magic! _That's_ what the specks of light were, she realized. She was, somehow, seeing _magic_.

She must have gasped at the realization, for the next thing she knew, her father was redirecting her gaze with one warm, gentle hand. There was a slight frown on his face as he said something she couldn't hear. She tried to focus on his eyes, but the magic specks were distracting.

When he spoke again, he spoke slowly, punctuating each word with a simple gesture that mimicked Fred's almost exactly, and Roxie knew what he was asking.

_Can you hear me?_

Slowly, she shook her head.

With calm reassurances, he took her to Mungo's, and she tried not to be disappointed. She drank in every bit of magic she could see, trying to figure out what the different colors were, trying to remember as many patterns as she could before the sound came back and the magic went away.

"Daddy, do you ever see lights in your workshop?" she asked later.

"Only when something explodes when I'm not expecting it," he joked, and she giggled because she knew she was supposed to, but his answer confirmed a disquieting thought. Neither her mother nor her father could see the magic lights. So why could she?

She was almost afraid to ask Fred, because what if he couldn't see them, either, and what if he thought she was mad for asking? But she had never been afraid to ask Fred anything, so one day when he was home from his third year at school and they were alone, she used her hands to ask the question, like she always did with thoughts she was afraid to say out loud.

_Do you see your magic?_

Fred frowned. After a moment, he signed back. _I see the spells happen. But that's not what you mean, right?_

Immediately, she was awash in relief. Because maybe he didn't see it like she did, but he knew immediately what she meant, and he didn't think she was crazy. Her hands flew through the air, telling him everything she had seen the two times her ears had stopped working.

He was quiet for a long time after her hands stilled, thinking. "And it only happens when . . ." He gestured to his ears, a meaningless gesture in terms of their language, but she knew what he meant. She nodded. "I've never heard of anything like that before." Then he signed _Can you make the magic do anything?_

 _I've never tried_ , she admitted.

 _Next time it comes back, experiment a little_ , Fred said, looking excited at the prospect.

But that was easier said than done. Mum, dismayed by the fact that Roxie had outgrown her spells without warning not once but twice, started taking her to Mungo's with greater frequency. It became clear to Roxie that if she was going to experiment, she was going to have to take things into her own hands.

The year Roxie was seven, her underage magic became rather explosive. Her dad would joke about apples not falling far from trees while expertly cleaning up whatever Roxie had blasted to smithereens this time. Her mum would huff as she cleaned up the mess and implore Roxie to _try_ and be a little more careful about the pottery. And Roxie did feel _bad_ about making things explode. It wasn't her intention. She was just trying to turn the spells in her ears off, but she had no idea how. Usually, she lost control, and all the magic spun outward, hitting something somewhere in the house.

But _finally_ , it worked. Finally, she turned that blast of magic inward, thoroughly disrupting the magic in her ears. Silence descended, the world lit up with color, and Roxie _grinned_ , ecstatic.

For almost an hour, she pushed bits of magic around her room, making them follow the shapes and patterns she remembered seeing the last two times. And things _happened_. Sometimes it was what she wanted and sometimes it wasn't, but she was using magic to make magic that wasn't an explosion! She was so excited she called Fred on the special two-way mirror he'd given her when he left for Hogwarts. She caught him between classes, and her fingers flew through the air, telling him everything. Signing through the mirror was a special challenge, but they'd long ago mastered it.

 _So you can't hear right now?_ Fred signed.

 _Not a single thing!_ she replied gleefully. _Watch_! And she showed him what she could do.

 _Not bad, Pebble_ , he signed, and she swelled with happiness. Then he cocked his head to the side for a moment. _Mum's coming_ , he signed and the mirror went dark, and Roxie went to meet the door like she'd been on her way to open it anyway. She tugged on her ear and Mum took her to Mungo's, and no one was any the wiser.

She wanted to shut the spells off again right away, but she knew she didn't dare, not until she knew how to put them back. She'd tried to watch the Healer, but it was all done at the side of her head and she couldn't see.

So instead she spent her time trying to see what magic she could make happen with her ears turned on. She pointed her finger and made the spell patterns in the air, but without being able to see the magic and make it move where she wanted, she didn't have much luck. One day, she snuck her dad's wand from the table while he was napping and tried the same things, and she had a little more success, especially if she knew the name of the spell. But some magic she'd only ever seen. It was very frustrating.

But Fred told her about the Charms books gathering dust in his room somewhere, and she spent every spare moment poring over them, memorizing spells and wand movements and incantations (though she honestly wasn't sure how incantations really helped) until she knew _The Standard Book of Spells_ , grades 1 and 2, practically by heart. She couldn't make any of them happen, but she knew their names and what they did and what shape to make in the air, and that was half the magic.

When she decided it had been long enough to get away with turning her ears off again (and when she was too impatient to wait any longer), she shut them down and ran through all the spells she'd learned. It was easier, so much easier than it had been the first time. She still couldn't make them all work, but she made a lot of them work, and she felt a thrill, having found something she could do well. She wanted to spend the whole day in silence, but it wasn't possible, not at eight years old with protective parents. She'd been careful to sit up against her door so she could feel the vibrations of anyone coming up the stairs, and as soon as the wall behind her rumbled slightly, she shoved the spellbooks out of sight, picked up a novel, and dove onto her bed with it.

When Mum burst through the door, all exasperation and probably demanding to know why Roxie wasn't answering her calls, Roxie schooled her face into the _startled to discover my hearing's gone!_ expression she'd practiced in the mirror. When they were home from Mungo's, her mother asked, "I don't understand - how did you not realize?"

"It's always quiet in my room," Roxie told her. "I guess I got really caught up in my book." And her mother left it alone.

But later that night, she heard her parents arguing about it. "Kids grow, Ang," her dad said, his voice not kept quiet enough to keep from spilling out of his workroom as she passed. She knew she shouldn't have, but she paused to listen. "You should have seen Mum trying to keep us all in robes that fit."

"But she didn't _tell_ me," was her mum's reply.

"She didn't notice! She was caught up in something else. Merlin knows she gets that from both of us. You were so wrapped up in your work last month, you didn't even notice when the shed caught on fire."

"When _you_ caught the shed on fire, you mean," Mum said in her icy, angry voice. "And the difference is, I'm not disabled!"

"Neither is she," her dad said, and now _his_ voice was going to its dangerous place, too, and that sent a spark of fear through Roxie because she _hated_ this, she hated it so much when her parents got angry and started yelling and she only now realized it was April, and how could she have done this in _April_? April was an Angry Month, she remembered that from when she was really little, back before Fred figured out how to get them to stop yelling all the time. Now they only yelled some of the time, but Roxie couldn't stop it like Fred could. Fred would just yell _PAUSE_ at the top of his lungs, and it would stop just like that, but Roxie's voice got stuck every time she thought about it. So she ran away from the workroom door and hit the squeaky steps on purpose and hoped that would be enough.

If they kept arguing, it was quiet enough that she didn't hear it, and that was enough for her.

The next time she wanted to turn her ears off, she was smarter about it. She waited for summer, when Fred was home, and she waited for a day when her parents were both gone and Fred was in charge. Fred was as eager for her to spend the day in silence as she was - he wanted to see what she could do.

The charms came so easily to her this time, especially with Fred helping. And he showed her new spells, too. The defense spells took a time or two watching for her to master, but she loved learning new magic.

 _This is so weird_ , Fred signed at one point. _Watching you do nonverbal spells with your finger. At eight._

 _When you see what the magic does, it's easy,_ she signed back with a shrug.

 _I'm just glad I made up signs for spells before I started school. Otherwise I'd have used wand movements, and you'd be setting off spells left and right every time we had a conversation_.

 _No, I wouldn't,_ Roxie said with a scowl. _I can't do anything if I can't see the magic._ Suddenly, a thought occurred to her. _Should we be worried about the Ministry wondering about all this magic? I don't want to get you in trouble._

Fred laughed. _The Ministry investigating weird magic? In this house?_ And Roxie smiled because of course he was right.

 _Okay_ , she signed. _Show me that Transfiguration again._

Transfiguration was the one skill she had trouble with. She could see the magic changing the objects, but she couldn't see how. She was getting frustrated with her lack of progress when Fred tweaked her nose and put it in perspective. _Yes_ , he signed. _I feel so bad for you. Eight years old and not able to master first year transfiguration wandless after forty minutes of effort._

They spent the whole day working magic together, and Roxie had never been happier. Half an hour before their parents were supposed to be home, Fred sent an owl saying that Roxie's spells had worn off and he was taking her to Mungo's via the Knight Bus and they'd be home soon.

Her euphoric high was dampened only slightly when the sounds came back and her world became less colorful. "I wish I knew how to turn the spells back _on_ ," she said to her brother as the Knight Bus rumbled its way back to their house.

"I tried to watch," Fred said. "But I couldn't see what the Healer was doing. Sorry, Pebble."

Unfortunately, the happy glow of the day came crashing down with the sound of raised voices echoing out from the closed front door.

"Three times in eight months isn't normal growth spurts, George, and you are being unbelievably cavalier about this!"

"And you are being overly protective, as always! She told her brother, and they're handling it!"

"That she's handling it isn't the issue! She shouldn't have to handle it - those Healers are doing something wrong!"

"Spell development is an inexact process-"

"And what if that inexact process happens at school?"

"Then she'll _handle it_ , like she's doing right now! Give our daughter a little credit!"

Roxie looked up at Fred, feeling scared and small. He knelt beside her and signed, _It's okay. They're going to stop. I'm going to make them. Don't let this take today away from you._ And he led her inside.

"Everything okay?" Fred asked as he opened the door, his voice pointed, and it had an immediate effect.

"Everything's fine, baby," their mum said, but her voice was tight and Roxie could feel the tension in the room. "I'm just concerned that the Healers aren't doing their jobs with those spells, and I hate that you had to make your way to Mungo's on your own. You could have waited for one of us to be home."

"It wasn't a problem," Fred said calmly, his arm around Roxie's shoulders. "And Roxie wanted it taken care of right away. Although, you know," he said, sounding thoughtful, and Roxie turned to look up at him quizzically, "it might be worth it to ask the Healers if they'll teach you how to lay the spells. Growth spurts are unpredictable, and I think this way you'd worry less, Mum."

"That's not a bad idea," their Dad said, and Roxie tried not to give anything away, even though her heart was pounding with anticipation.

It took her mother a moment, but eventually she nodded, saying, "That might be best."

The next day was life-changing for Roxie. The whole family went to Mungo's, and Roxie sat while Healers and her parents and her brother placed and activated and deactivated the spells that helped her hear. The constant flickering of magic in and out of her perception almost gave her a headache, but she powered through because she knew as soon as they got home, Fred would slip into her room and teach her how to activate and deactivate the spells for herself.

Being able to fully control the spells on her ears opened up Roxie's world tenfold. She turned her ears off every chance she got. Her control of the magic around her grew by leaps and bounds. So did her understanding of what she could see. She turned nine, and mastered almost entirely the Standard Book of Spells, book three. When Hogwarts' winter break came around, she demanded that Fred show her more defense and transfiguration spells. She felt free, and she loved it.

But the freedom made her careless. She was young and ambitious and short-sighted, and she forgot too quickly the need to be careful and alert. And one night, when she was alone in the living room and Fred was at Aunt Ginny's and couldn't listen for her, she forgot to pay attention to the how long she'd been shut up, making things fly around the room toward her. And she forgot to pay attention to the vibrations in the floor. And not until sound flooded sharply back into her world did she realize that her mother had come into the room, catching her in her silence.

Angelina was beside herself. Roxie had seen her mother that angry before, but never directed at her.

The anger was unleashed in a stream of heated questions that Roxie wouldn't have known how to answer even if her mother had given her the chance. _What were you thinking?_ and _How can you keep doing this?_ and _Do you not understand how serious your condition is and how important it is that we treat it?_ She was told she had to grow up, told she had to start accepting responsibility, and told in no uncertain terms the horrors and hardships that awaited her if this behavior continued.

She didn't know what to say to any of it, and then her mother's shouting brought her father into the room, and she knew he was coming to her defense, but it didn't feel like that, not when he was shouting, too. And the shouting may have started out being about her, but it didn't stay that way for long, it never did, and she didn't know how to make it stop. She signed _pause pause pause pause_ over and over again, but her parents didn't sign, even if they had been paying attention to her, and she couldn't find her voice, and she hated this.

She retreated. She turned her ears off, too, hoping to escape the shouting, but it didn't do any good. She could _feel_ it, in the floorboards, in the walls, in the air itself. The entire house was _alive_ with the fighting, and so she did what she had always done.

She was signing for help before Fred's face had fully appeared in the mirror, her movements frantic and wild, and he had to stop her with a firm gesture and remind her _In the mirror and slower, or you have to speak it,_ but then he heard it, filtering through the mirror, and his face went black. _How long?_ he asked.

 _Just a few minutes,_ she told him, _but it's about me, Mum caught me, without my ears on, and she got so mad and then dad took my side and it just keeps getting worse._

_I'm coming._

And he was gone, but Molly and James were there, in the mirror, signing to her and telling her everything would be all right, and that she could hang on til Fred got there, and she was almost able to pull herself together.

She felt it when he arrived, and she turned her ears back on in time to hear his " _Pause,_ " reverberate through the house in a voice that was huge and loud and scary. The shouting stuttered to a silence, and Roxie crept to the open door so that she could hear more clearly. Fred never yelled. He might speak loudly to be heard or get someone's attention, but when he was angry, he _never_ yelled, and Roxie loved that about him.

"You know," Fred said then to their parents, in a voice that was conversational but still dangerous, "it's not much of an incentive for Roxie to live in a world with her ears turned on if all she's ever going to hear is shouting."

He kept going. He had plenty to say, but Roxie didn't need to hear it. She retreated to her room and crawled onto her bed, burying her head in her knees. She turned off her ears because that, at least, was something she could control. She tried not to cry. She tried not to think.

After a long few moments, a gentle hand on her knee made her look up. _You didn't answer when I knocked_ , Fred signed, sitting on the edge of her bed. _You okay?_

Roxie shrugged. Then she signed, _How much did you tell them?_

She was scared of the answer, especially when Fred gave a heavy sigh. _Not much,_ he said. _I mostly just scolded them. I didn't spill your secrets._ She was halfway through trying not to visibly sag with relief when he signed his next phrase. _But you should._

She froze, staring. Then she signed, emphatically, _NO._

 _You should, Pebble_ , he said again.

 _Why?_ she demanded.

 _Because I'm not always going to be here,_ he signed. _I'm not always going to be able to drop everything and come speak for you, and honestly, I shouldn't. I love you, I will always support you, but Roxie, I cannot be your voice. You have to find your voice. You have to learn to speak for yourself, and this is how you start. They want to help. They just don't know how. They don't understand what you want. So you should tell them. Why not?_

Roxie looked down. She could think of lots of reasons why not, but she didn't think Fred would accept any of them.

One gentle hand lifted her face so she was looking at him again. _Give them a chance._

_I don't know how. I don't know how to talk to them._

_I'll help_ , he assured her. _I'll be right here._

 _What if they make me stop?_ she asked then, giving voice to the thought that truly plagued her. She couldn't give up her magic, she just couldn't.

 _They won't_. _Tell them what you can do, Roxie. Let them be as proud of you as I am._

Before she could say yes or no, he turned away from her to the doorway. Their parents were standing there, looking chagrined and shocked. _Mum just asked if we were having a real conversation_ , Fred signed quickly. _And Dad wants to know when we learned sign language._

_What did you tell them?_

_The truth. That you've never not known sign language, and I started learning about an hour after you were born._

_Break it to them gently that my first word wasn't Dada, okay?_

That made Fred laugh, and for a moment, everything was okay. But then he signed, _Ears on,_ and she could read lips well enough to know he'd said it out loud. When she hesitated, he said again, _Ears on, Pebble._

She glanced at her parents' confused faces and immediately wished she hadn't. Taking a deep breath, she raised her hands to her ears and reactivated the spells in time to hear her mother say, ". . . don't understand; why are Roxie's ears _off_? I just reactivated the spells!"

She expected Fred to answer, because that was what Fred did, but he just turned slightly and looked at her. She blanched.

"What, _now_?" she blurted out, and he gave her a look.

"No, six weeks from now," was his sarcastic reply. "Yes, now, Rox." When she hesitated, he signed, _You can do it. I'm here. I'll help. But it's time_.

So she took a deep breath and said, "They were off because I turned them off. They're on now because I turned them on."

"And . . . how do you know how to do that?" her dad asked with genuine intrigue.

"Fred showed me. I mean, he showed me how to actually turn the spells on and off. I could get rid of them before, but I just pushed magic at them until they went away. Now I can do it for real."

Understanding started to dawn in her dad's eyes as he put the timeline together, and he was looking at her with newfound comprehension and respect, but her mum was nothing short of horrified.

" _Why_?" she demanded. "Why would you do that, Roxie? What was that accomplishing?"

And then, just like usual when it came to Roxie's ears, she was off with a tirade of questions with no silence between them. Each question made Roxie more and more anxious, just like always, and her hands twitched in her lap, wanting to say something, but she remembered what Fred said about finding her voice, so she took a deep breath, pushed through the terror at what she was about to do, and said, " _MUM!_ " as loudly as she could. Her mum stared at her, startled into silence, and Roxie took another deep breath and said, "Please don't ask me questions if you aren't going to let me answer them."

Her heart was pounding, certain the yelling was about to start again, but instead her mum just jerked back and took a deep breath of her own. When she spoke, it was quieter and more focused. "Why do you want to turn your ears off, Roxie?"

One more encouraging smile from Fred gave her the confidence to answer. "Because that's the only way I can see the magic."

Once she got started, explaining and telling the story turned out to be much easier than she ever thought it would. She told them everything, from the first time she'd seen the swirling colors to what she'd been trying to master this afternoon before her mother found her. She told them all the ways that Fred had helped, the sign language, the spellbooks, the constant encouragement.

And then, because they asked her to, she turned off her ears and showed them what she could do. _Lumos_. _Accio_. _Wingardium Leviosa._ All with just a pointed finger and fierce determination. She watched her dad perform a spell she'd never seen before, and recreated it with passable success. And then she turned her ears back on and waited to see how they'd react at the end of it all.

She cared about her dad's reaction, but it was her mum she kept her eyes on when she'd said all she had to say. Her mum sat, quiet and introspective for a long few moments, gathering her thoughts. She didn't seem to know what to say. "Where do we go from here?" she finally asked.

"What do you mean?" Roxie's dad asked her, and her mum almost laughed.

"I mean, three quarters of the wizarding population never master wandless magic, and here our _nine_ -year-old- I feel like we have to tell somebody about this."

"Don't tell anyone who will make me stop," Roxie broke in desperately. "Please. I can't give this up until I start Hogwarts. _Please_."

Her dad rubbed his chin. "I don't know if it's that simple, Roxie. The law is fuzzy on the subject of pre-school-age wizards and witches. The Trace doesn't do a whole lot of good when you live in a house full of magic, so parents are supposed to keep an eye on their magical children. Hogwarts students aren't allowed to do magic outside of school, but you're not _in_ school." He frowned, considering. "I don't know where the line is," he finally admitted. "But I do know we're operating outside of what is normal. And I know we don't want to tell anyone who's going to take Roxie away to poke and prod at her. Maybe we should talk to Hermione?"

"I think we should talk to the Ollivanders," Fred said.

"The Ollivanders?" their dad repeated, confused, and Roxie was with him.

"Why would we talk to wandmakers about this?" she asked her brother.

"Because," he said patiently, tweaking her nose. "Outside of the DoM, I can't think of anyone else who has more insights into the seemingly impossible ways people can use magic than wandmakers. Especially _wandless_ magic."

"That's a good point, Fred," their mum said. "I hadn't thought of that, but - of course Ollivander will have some idea how Roxie is able to do this."

" _And_ ," Fred added, with a smile in Roxie's direction, "I know Garrett, the most recent Ollivander. He only left Hogwarts two years ago. _He_ won't make you stop. If anything, he'll make you do it over and over until he figures out how it's possible."

And so it was settled. Their mum pulled Fred aside to ask him questions about Garrett Ollivander, and Roxie's dad took the opportunity to ask her, very softly, "Would you teach me to sign?" Roxie stared at him.

"Really?" she asked. He smiled.

"Really. Rox, I don't want you to ever feel like you can't talk to me. To us. I know we don't make it easy sometimes, and I'm sorry that you've felt like you can't be heard. And I know because of that, it might take you a while to find your voice. But until you do, I want you to be able to talk to me in whatever language you're comfortable with. I just have to know it, too."

She threw her arms around his neck. Then she held her hand in front of her mouth and moved it down in an arch. "That's 'thank you,'" she said. Her dad repeated the gesture.

"So that's a yes?" he asked with a smile, and she nodded enthusiastically.

"Only . . . I just have to give Fred a chance to warn Molly and James." Her dad laughed out loud at that.

"So much makes sense now," he said, crossing to Fred, who had heard that part of the conversation.

"It's fine," he said. "We've already perfected the Mischief Dialect."

And then her mum was in front of her, and her dad and brother were fading away to let them have the moment, and Roxie almost wished they wouldn't because she still didn't know how to be alone with her mum.

But her mum was looking at her in a way she'd never looked at Roxie before. And before Roxie could figure out what she thought about that, her mum slowly and carefully raised a closed hand to her chest and made a small circle.

 _I'm sorry_.

Her mum looked nervous, and that made Roxie feel _less_ nervous. "Me too," she was able to say. "I shouldn't have kept it a secret. I should have told you."

Her mum nodded, looking thoughtful. "Maybe. But I understand why you didn't. We waited so long to have you, Roxie. We wanted to make sure we were ready. And then -" She shook her head, searching for the words. "To hear that something's wrong with your baby-"

"But nothing's wrong with me, Mum," Roxie said. A day ago, an _hour_ ago, she would never have been able to say it, but now she knew how important it was. "Being deaf doesn't take anything away from me. It gives me _more_."

Her mum was silent for a long time, then she nodded. "I'm starting to understand that," she said. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long. I promise to be better about listening."

"And I promise to be better about talking."

"And will you teach me to sign along with your dad?"

Roxie grinned. "Yes." And she shifted on the bed so she was facing her mum. She held both hands up in front of her, palms out, and then brought her fingers together. "That's 'pause,'" she said, and was rewarded with a small laugh.

"Yeah, I might need that one in two languages. So. Tomorrow, we will all go to Ollivanders, and we will see if we can figure out this incredible thing you can do, and we'll move forward from there. But whatever we learn tomorrow, I'm gonna be on your side from here on out, okay? So tell me. What does magic look like?"

Roxie's eyes lit up. She felt like a huge weight was gone from her chest. She loved that she could talk about it now, that she wasn't buried under the secret. For the first time since she'd seen the swirls of magic, she had no trouble finding her voice to answer her mother. "Oh, Mum," she said with a happy sigh. "It's so pretty. I wish you could see it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am fascinated by disability in the wizarding world. I am filled with questions about what can be fixed with a wave of the wand, and what can't, and why, and I do not have satisfactory canon answers, so I made up my own. So my Roxie is deaf because I write Fred and Angelina's children for Maggie. But Roxie is also deaf because I wanted to explore disability in the wizarding world. What if, I asked myself, it's not something that can be "cured" with a wave of a wand, but what if there are spells that function kind of like glasses do for people like me with super broken eyes?
> 
> That, of course, led me to thinking about the magical equivalent of other sense getting stronger when one is taken away, and I kept coming back to this idea about being able to see magic. I've had a lot of fun deciding how magic works in the HP world through this piece, and I plan on exploring the question further. You might recognize this Roxie and this question from Taking Chances. I want very much to write more of her and get into what comes out of this visit to Ollivanders, and where she goes when she gets to Hogwarts, and what her life ends up looking like, so keep your eyes open!


	14. Lysander Scamander

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you have all learned a valuable lesson about believing anything I promise you ever with regards to a posting schedule. Also, I'm the worst, and I'm sorry. Have a Lysander! Twin coming soon. Ish.

"HUFFLEPUFF!"

Eleven-year-old Lysander Scamander bit back a groan. Hufflepuff? Why _Hufflepuff_ of all places? He pasted a smile on his face as the Hall applauded, but inwardly, he was grousing.

_C'mon Lorcan. You're plenty smart enough for Ravenclaw. Why'd you have to be such a do-gooder?_

But his brother was clearly nothing but excited to be joining the badgers, so Lysander tried to be excited for him. Lorcan flashed him a double thumbs up as he passed, and Lysander returned it only a bit half-heartedly.

"Scamander, Lysander!"

Lysander had traveled all around the world in his short eleven years of life. He had experienced countless cultures, lived with more different groups and tribes and communities than he could keep track of for weeks at a time, and if there was one thing he had learned, it was that some things were universal. Every group of kids left to their own devices would eventually start chasing a ball around. Dads around the world told the worst jokes ever conceived. And everyone, _everyone_ everywhere thought it was just _hilarious_ that Lysander's name _rhymed_.

As he mounted the stone steps to the predictable sounds of stifled giggles, he couldn't keep from glowering just a little. _Thanks, Mum and Dad,_ he thought darkly. His time at Hogwarts was already off to a _great_ start.

And now he was headed for Hufflepuff. Hufflepuff! All because his brother was the most friendly and outgoing bugger in the entire world.

It wasn't that Lysander didn't value hard work and loyalty. But loyalty should be earned, not just handed out to everyone left, right, and center. And hard work was only worth it if it gained _you_ something in the process. Lorcan was far too idealistic. Lysander could only hope that all Hufflepuffs wouldn't be the same. Hopefully someone in his house would share his sense of practicality.

Then the Hat shifted on top of his head and yelled out "SLYTHERIN!"

Lysander froze. "What?" he said, but no one heard him over the cheers and applause.

"Up you hop, my boy," Professor Flitwick said when Lysander didn't move from the stool. "Off to the Slytherin table with you."

"But I-I can't," he stammered, at a loss for words. He sought out Lorcan, the one person in the room who looked as shocked and stricken as he felt.

Never, he had _never_ \- they were twins! They were twins, they had spent their whole lives together, no matter how much their world shifted and changed, Lorcan was the one constant. He was always there, at Lysander's side. There had to be a mistake. He _couldn't_ be in a different House than Lorcan! It didn't make any _sense_!

Lorcan snapped out of it first. "It's okay!" he said, not that Lysander could hear him. But he could read his lips. He knew what his brother was saying. "It's okay, go on." He couldn't help but notice, though, that as his brother was saying _it's okay_ , he was shaking his head _no_.

But Lysander knew he had to move or risk looking foolish in front of the entire school, so he staggered to his feet and stumbled across the Hall to the green table.

His numb confusion lingered through the whole meal. He didn't say a word to anyone, and he barely tasted his food. And when the meal was over and Headmistress Sinastra had finished her welcome address, he let himself be herded out the door and down to the dungeons, not attempting to find Lorcan in the crush of students. He didn't think he could handle whatever optimistic outlook Lorcan would try to convince him to cling to.

His sense of self-preservation shook him further out of his fog. He woke up enough at the entrance to the Slytherin Common Room to know he had to pay attention to the location and the password, because if he didn't, he'd have to ask another student to help him, and then he'd have to explain why he hadn't remembered in the first place.

So he memorized the length of passageway almost indistinguishable from any other length of passageway, and dutifully recited back the password - _semper incrementum_ \- and followed the other Slytherin first years into their new Common Room.

The room calmed him, and that was a surprise. But the view out the huge towering windows across from the doorway that look out into the depths of the lake was soothing, the gentle movement of lakeweed in the underwater current and the hint of water creatures darting in and out of view was mesmerizing. He didn't know anything about Hufflepuff's Common Room, but the thought of living in a tower had always made him vaguely uncomfortable. He had always despised heights. So there, at least, was a silver lining.

But as they were escorted to their dormitories, Lorcan's absence became more and more tangible. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to be with his brother.

He waited for the five other boys to choose their beds, then took the one that was left. He unpacked his trunk carefully and in silence, while the others chattered away around him. They all knew each other already, but he didn't know any of them, eliciting yet another dark _Thanks, Mum and Dad_ in his head.

His parents were famed magizoologists, which was why he'd grown up traveling the world, being dragged along with them as they searched for rare and dangerous creatures. Lorcan loved it. He already wanted to go into the family business as soon as he was done at Hogwarts, but Lysander was less sure. He'd never really enjoyed bouncing around from place to place all the time. Nothing ever felt permanent, nothing ever felt routine or normal. Lorcan always said that what they had was _better_ than normal, but Lysander had never been able to figure out if he agreed.

Because if his life, his childhood, had been _normal_ , maybe he'd know one or two of these boys. Maybe he'd have grown up with them. Maybe he wouldn't feel so alone and out of place now.

He could feel a tense prickle at the top of his spine, always a sure sign that he'd have nightmares tonight as he fell asleep. He could practically feel the bad dreams creeping up on him. He _hated_ the nightmares. He hated that he had no control over them.

Luckily, he knew, there was a creature, a magical guardian spirit called the Filica who kept nightmares at bay. His mother had told him about her years ago, back when Lysander had been plagued by night terrors. There was even a special song to summon her. Lysander had never seen the Filica himself, but whenever the dreams had gotten too bad and he'd sung the song, the Filica had brought his mother to him to soothe the fear away.

He'd asked his mother once why the Filica didn't appear herself to help him in the night. "Because I'm here," she'd answered. "And it takes less energy for her to summon me than to chase away the dreams herself. But if I ever wasn't here, she would protect you." So Lysander knew that he'd be safe tonight even if the dreams came for him.

Or - would he? It suddenly occurred to him that this was a boy's dorm, and it was under a lake. The Filica was a female spirit of air. Maybe she wouldn't be able to get it. And if Hogwarts had other guardian spirits to take her place, he'd never heard of them. Surely, he thought, surely one of the other boys here was nervous, too. Surely asking about the Filica wouldn't call attention to his own nerves.

It was funny, the instants you could pinpoint later in your life. The moment in time you could look back on say, _That one, there. That decision changed everything_. Lysander would remember forever the hot burn of shame and anger that consumed him as the five boys sharing his dorm laughed at and ridiculed him. He would remember forever the sleepless night he spent, lying, seething behind the heavy green curtains, forcing himself to stay away because he would be _damned_ if he let those boys get the jump on him as some kind of "joke," and he'd be _damned_ if he let himself have a nightmare in front of them.

The first magic he learned at Hogwarts wasn't the Levitation Charm, and it wasn't how to change a match into a needle. It was a Silencing Charm, and he taught it to himself so that if he woke up screaming, no one would hear.

It taught him well, that experience. It taught him that no one could be trusted, not mothers who spun lies as if they were real things or fathers who let it happen or brothers who somehow grew up into completely different people even coming from the same experiences. And if mothers and fathers and brothers, if _family,_ couldn't be trusted, then what more could he expect from teachers or classmates or boys who shared his space?

No, he realized with hardened resolve as he stared up at his bedcurtains after a full two weeks of ridicule, the only person he could truly rely on was himself. So he and he alone would figure out a way to make them all _back off_ , until he could escape everything that made him odd, and finally, _finally_ , be normal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the Lysander from A Lot to Learn, and I wanted his moment in this project to look at the "betrayal" that defines him for the next six years. I struggled a bit with this chapter, because I wanted a scene that stands on its own, but doesn't completely rehash what I've already explored in A Lot to Learn. But basically, at his core, Lysander just wants to be normal. He wants a normal family and a normal child, and he wants it even more strongly when he realizes the full extent of his oddity. The conclusion he ultimately comes to is that if he can't be normal, he can at least be seen as normal, a mindset that leads to him distancing himself from his brother and joining in on the ridiculing of his mother.
> 
> Lorcan's piece, which I hope to finish soon, will bookend this idea and give resolution. In the meantime, you should really go read A Lot to Learn because it will flesh out the brothers quite nicely.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a review.


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